  They conquered the planet and they [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from From the head of the platoon Lieutenant Lee Hartford signaled Sergeant Felix, busy policing up stragglers at the rear, that he was taking over. Hartford tongued the volume-setting of his bitcher to "Low" and softly sing-songed to his three dozen troopers: "Your girlfriend's just an hour away; there's a time to soldier and a time to play. Pick it HUP, HUP, HUP! 'Toon, tain-HUT.' HUP, twop, threep, furp; HUP, HUP; HUP, twop, threep, furp. Mondrian, pick up the cadence; you're marching like a man with a paper pelvis. Swing 'em six to the front and three to the rear; When you sing to your Daddy, sing it loud and clear." Hartford turned up the volume. "Three weeks in the woods, eating squeeze-tube beans; We'd be better off in the Fleet Marines. Sound off!" "ONE, TWO," boomed the voice of the Terrible Third, sounding from the bitchers at the chests of thirty-six safety-suits. Dust slapped up from marching-boots. A flock of scarlet blabrigars settled on the road ahead, chattering and watching like small boys. "Sound hoff!" "THREE, FOUR!" The road led uphill toward Stinkerville; they were some three miles from First Regiment Barracks. Three miles from now these troopers could shed their safety-suits and helmets, shower off three weeks of sweat, drink a beer and leer at the short-skirted, taut-haltered girls of the Service Companies. "Who are we?" Hartford chanted. "COMPANY C," the troopers blatted back. The blabrigars, fluttering up from the roadway, chanted too: "Who are we? Company See. Who, we? See, see. Company See Are Wee See See." These wild birds didn't memorize human speech as well as their captive cousins; they garbled their mockeries immediately. The flock settled into the sunflowers beside the road; and were joined by a pair of wild camelopards, chewing sunflower-leaf cud as they peered at the marching Axenites. Hartford looked about, but there were no Stinkers—Kansans—in sight. These natives didn't care to watch the occupying regiment stir up their homeland's dust. "What platoon?" Hartford called, his voice magnified by the bitcher till the whole column could hear him. "THIRD PLATOON," the men bellowed back, singing against the percussion of their boots. "'Toon, click, click, click; 'toon, click, third platoon, click," mocked the blabrigars in ragged chorus, reflecting both the words and the marching feet. "Best platoon?" "THIRD PLATOON!" the men shouted. They'd turned up their bitchers to a volume the blabrigars couldn't match. Disgusted, the birds flapped their scarlet wings and flew off across the sunflower fields. "'Toon," one rear-flier chanted, "'toon, 'toon, 'toon." "Worst platoon?" Hartford asked. "FIRST PLATOON!" That was for the benefit of Lieutenant Piacentelli, commanding the tail-end of the Regiment, the platoon marching on either side of the lumbering Decontamination Vehicle, their safety-suit filters clogging with the dust. "Sound off!" Hartford shouted. "ONE, TWO!" That'll rattle the windows in Stinkerville, Hartford thought. He pitched his descant louder and higher. "Sound off!" "THREE, FOUR!" "Run 'er on down!" "ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR; ONE, TWO, THREEP—FURP!" The men of The Terrible Third were grinning through the face-plates of their helmets, rejoicing in their reputation as the loudest bunch in the Regiment, happy to help Hartford in waging his mock-feud with Lieutenant Piacentelli. They'd been classmates at the Axenite Academy; they'd been room-mates in the Barracks until Pia's recent marriage to a Service Company officer. Hartford lowered his bitcher to a confidential tone. "Square up, men; march tall; look rough and dirty. Show the Stinker girls what they're missing. HUP, HUP, HUP. Sling those rifles square. Mondrian, you march like you're wearing skis: HUP, twop, threep, furp!" Up and down the column came the commands of sergeants and platoon-commanders, getting their troopers in parade-trim for the march through Kansannamura: "Stinkerville." Somewhere up front a company was singing the anthem of the Axenite troopers, "Oh, Pioneers!" The chorus of twelve dozen men, their bitchers full-up, filled the Kansan air and echoed from the walls ahead. Stinkerville, all white-washed, with flakes of mica glittering in the sunlight, sprawled across the road that led to the Barracks. The village wall, designed to keep wild camelopards from roaming the streets and to keep the tame beasts out of the sunflower-fields, was some eight feet tall. Some Indigenous Hominid had heard the Regiment's clatter and song, for the gates of Kansannamura were open, the brick streets were clear of Stinker commerce. The village seemed deserted. A few blabrigars perched on the tiled eaves of the rammed-earth houses, making echoic comments on the sounds of the troopers, singing fleeting snatches of "Oh, Pioneers!" A camelopard stretched its ridiculous, three-horned head at the end of its fathom of neck to peer, big-brown-eyed, at the caravan of fishbowl-headed men. Up at the head of the column the Regiment's flags were unfurled and the Regimental Band was skirling the Anthem; men were counting cadence as their boots clicked over the scrubbed bricks of Stinkerville's streets. But no Kansan, Stinker, Indigenous Hominid, Gook or Native watched. No cowboy youngsters stared at the gunned-and-holstered men from another planet. No elders looked down their noses at the brash invaders. No mothers wiped their hands on their aprons as they thought of their sons, and the fleshly price they'd pay for freedom. No teenage girls, those patrons of parades, watched with lips half-open with apprehension and audacious thoughts about the hundreds of gift-wrapped young man marching past. This planet could have as well been named Coventry as Kansas, Hartford thought. Out the far gate of Kansannamura marched Third Platoon, Company "C," then First Platoon, flanking the Decontamination Vehicle. A villager came from the house nearest the gate and closed it. He did not look after the two columns of men winding up through the fields of sunflowers to the high plateau where they lived. The sight of the Barracks gave the men's steps a new swing and spring. After three weeks of sleeping in safety-suits; of breathing, sweating, drinking, eating and excreting through germ-barrier valves and tubing, the prospect of stripping off the plastic battle-dress was seductive. Inside that eight stories of windowless, doorless stone were gardens where the troopers could walk barefoot on the grass, pools whose water could splash their naked skin. In the Barracks were the three hundred Service Company women who made the big stone box home to their three thousand men. The men of First Regiment massed on the parade-ground. While they stood At Ease, their plastic-sleeved rifles and packs growing heavier by the minute, their safety-suits staler, four of the five Service Companies marched out from the Syphon to join them. The women were suited in yellow plastic, giving rise to the gags about fool's gold. The four golden companies took up position at the center of the Regiment. Colonel Benjamin Nef, Commander-in-Chief, Kansas, CINCK, climbed to the reviewing-stand in his command safety-suit of scarlet. Facing into the sun, the Colonel had the polarizing shield dropped over his eyes, and seemed to be wearing a black bandage. His lower jaw beetled to give him a truculent look generally ratified by his actions. His hair glinted through the helmet like spun copper. Nef turned to his second-in-command, a lieutenant-colonel in ordinary officer's blues, and murmured instructions. The light colonel saluted, turned the controls of his bitcher to Full Loud, and addressed the troopers assembled: "Regiment...." Down the chain-of-command came the ripple of warning: "Battaaalion...." "Commmpaneee...." "'Toooon...." "Tain-HUT!" Fifteen hundred pairs of boots smacked together. The Adjutant held up his clipboard and read precisely: "Attention to orders: "One. Officer of the Guard, Lieutenant Lee Hartford. "Two. CINCK commends troopers involved in the just-completed three-week Field Exercise on not having had a single incident of compromise of sterility. Household, Maintenance and Security troopers are complimented on having maintained the integrity of the Barracks with a much-reduced force. "Three. All male and female troopers are again cautioned that fraternization with Indigenous Hominids is an offense punishable by General Court-Martial, and that any unauthorized intercourse with the natives is prohibited." There was of course a murmur of automatic laughter at this last bit of official double-entendre. The idea of bedding-down a Stinker wench was a favorite bit of pornographic fantasy. An air-tight safety-suit, though fit with valves as functional as the drop-seat in long-johns, was no garment for romance. To undress, to appear in outdoor Kansas outside that head-to-foot sausage-casing, appealed to none of the troopers. Healthy young men and women don't entertain the thought of painful suicide. The reporting officer about-faced, saluted Colonel Nef, about-faced again. "Present...." "Preezent...." "Preeezent...." "Preeeezent...." "HAHMS!" Fifteen hundred Dardick-rifles, sheathed in plastic, slapped perpendicular. The blue-clad officers, armed with pistols, touched their index fingers to their helmet-temples. The bandsmen's drums growled, the electronic horns sobbed against their mutes, and the flutes in lonely purity played the theme of "Oh, Pioneers!" For all his har-de-har-hardness, Hartford felt a sting in his eyes at this moment, as he did whenever the splendidly stage-managed ceremony of Retreat was performed. After the Anthem, much louder, the band played Retreat. The colors crept down the flagstaff, into the reverent arms of a pair of Service Policemen. "Oh-deph, HAHMS! By line-of-battalions, line-of-companies, line-of-platoons, line-of-squads, return to quarters and dismiss!" The light colonel made one last salute to CINCK, and the little ballet on the reviewing-stand was over. The troopers were now free to go in to their showers, their latrines, their suppers, and their women. "At ease," Hartford told the Terrible Third. "Rest. Smoke if you've got 'em." The men chuckled dutifully at the oldest joke in the service. An Axenite trooper, sealed in his germ-free safety-suit and helmet, is by definition a non-smoker outside his Barracks. It would be another hour they'd be outside, since the Third was next to the last of the fifty platoons to swim home through the Syphon. While the companies on the far left flank of the Regiment were ballooning-up and peeling-off in columns-of-squads to enter the Barracks, Hartford went back to talk with Piacentelli, C.O. of First Platoon. II Getting inside the Barracks was a production. The safety-suits worn outside presumably bore on their outer surfaces all the dust-borne bugs native to Kansas. To carry these bacteria into the Barracks, to be inspired and ingested by Axenites—humans who'd never before had a bacterium inside their bodies—would wipe out the Regiment. Axenites are chemically pure people. They have no immuniological experience. Their gamma-globulin is low, their intestinal walls are thin. They may be killed by a light salting of staphyllococci, a soupcon of strep, or just a pinch of B. subtilis, a buglet as innocuous to "normal" humans as the dust-motes it inhabits. The Syphon was the only entrance to the Barracks. It opened as the "Wet Gut," a ramp leading downward into liquid disinfectant which finally filled a tunnel, which ran the length of the Barracks. Each trooper, as he walked down into the disinfectant, grabbed the hand-holds at either side to pull himself along. Half-swimming through a turbulent portion that tugged at his suit with cavitations designed to loose the gummiest particle of bug-dirt, he came to a quieter section where he wormed along in silence, watching the man ahead of him, his stay in the antiseptic gauged to make the outside of his safety-suit as germ-free as the inside. The Wet Gut ended in an upslope. The troopers walked out, dripping, into a hallway returning in the direction from which they'd just swum. This upper arm of the Syphon was a hallway so brilliantly lighted that the trooper had to drop his polarizing shields over his eyes. The air here in the Hot Gut was spiced with ozone from the ultra-violet sources. As each man strode down the Hot Gut at a set pace, his suit was bathed in u-v light from lamps in the ceiling, floor and walls. Just as he was washed sufficiently in the Wet Gut to kill the sturdiest-shelled spore of anthrax, the most insistently cysted protozooan, in the Hot Gut he was laved in actinic radiation powerful enough to afford a one hundred per cent safety factor against his bringing viable bug-dirt into the Barracks. At the very end of the Syphon, so that his safety-suit wouldn't stink of disinfectant or crack from ozone-rot, the trooper was blasted from all sides by a needle-shower of sterile water. Then he was home. The platoon to the left of the Terrible Third had ballooned and was column-of-squadding toward the entrance to the Syphon. "At ease, men," Hartford said. "Increase suit-pressure one pound. Open and check reserve air-tanks. Close off filters." The men blimped a bit. Their suits sausaged out around their arms and legs. Should some trooper have a pinhole in his safety-suit, the positive pressure within would keep the deadly antiseptic solution from seeping in. "Okay, men. First squad off to the sheep-dip. Check the man ahead of you for bubbles. This is Save-Your-Buddy Week," Hartford said. Fat-legged and stiff, the men of Third Platoon waddled through the doorway and down the ramp into the bug-juice. One by one they went under, tugging themselves along through the turbulent area, past that; then turning over in three planes so that the man behind them could spot bubbles coming from any part of their safety-suit. A leak, of course, meant Decontamination. Decontamination meant an all-over shave, a load of antibiotics and quarantine. But it was better that one man should suffer this from time to time than that the Barracks should be sullied with a single bit of germ-laden dust. The pale-green murk of the Wet Gut and the desert brightness of the Hot Gut were the gates of home, and welcome. Hartford saw the Terrible Third off to their quarters, then got together with Piacentelli to go up to Officers' Country. It was good to un-clam helmets and breathe the inside air, smelling faintly green from having swept across the gardens on Level Eight. Hartford shucked off his blue suit and draped it over a refreshing unit. The device buzzed into action, washing, drying and recharging the safety-suit with fresh filters and reserve air and water. The moment the refresher had grunted an okay to his safety-suit, Hartford carried it, clean and sweet as the day it had left the Goodyear plant on Titan, to hang it up in his locker, ready for his next foray onto bug-dirt. Piacentelli was already under a shower. "Come on, jay-bird," he shouted. "Last one out buys the beers." "No contest," Hartford said, setting the shower-dial. "I'm gonna stay under water for three weeks." He revolved blissfully beneath cold and angry needles. Piacentelli, snowed in with suds and steam, yelled through the blasting water. "How'd you rate O.G. the night we get in?" he asked. "I thought you were Nasty Nef's fairhaired boy." Hartford turned off his shower. "I got nothing better to do," he said. He stood on the drier for a minute. "I don't mind being Officer of the Guard, so long as I can eat supper off a plate instead of through a tube." He stepped into his shorts, pulled on sneakers and tugged on a tee-shirt that had stenciled over its shoulders the two half-inch gold stripes of his rank. Pia dressed in a similar uniform. "It isn't the Messhall I miss," he said. "It's this. No number of ingenious engines, valves and relief-tubes can still my nostalgia for the simple dignity of our Barracks latrines." Junior Officers' Mess was set in what looked like a park, except that the bushes were tomato-plants and the trees grew apples. The tables were mostly full. "All the subalterns getting in a quick sundowner," Pia remarked, finding a two-place table yet untaken. A Service Company K.P. in the brief skirt-and-halter Class B's the women wore informally in the Barracks came to take their order. "Big cold beer for me, honey," Pia said. "The other gentleman is tonight's O.G., so he'll have a black, black coffee." Hartford stared after the girl. "You're right, Pia," he said. "No matter how comfy Goodyear makes those safety-suits, home is best." "You bachelors are a threat to the Table of Organization," Piacentelli said. "You'd breed us right out of house and home if you had a chance." "Damned right," Hartford said. "You could find a girl," Piacentelli said. "They all itch to get married," Hartford explained. "They come out to these germy planets like they used to go to Purdue. The man-woman ratio is in their favor. And biology. Pia, I've seen bears you wouldn't glim twice on Titan turn into love-goddesses after six months here. I'll meet some Service Company corporal, say. She'll look to me like the prettiest li'l thing since Adam's costectomy, and I'll call in at the Orderly Room to have us assigned Family Quarters. Back at Home Base, she'll turn out to be something you scare kids quiet with. She'll talk all the time, leave lipstick on drinking-glasses, or play bridge and talk about it. First thing you know, I'll be volunteering for another five years duty on bug-dirt, just for a chance to leave her behind." "So pick up a local germ," Piacentelli suggested. "If they can't decontaminate you, they'll send you to Earth. Lots of women on Earth." "I'd do it," Hartford said, "but I'm still more scared of microbes than lustful for a woman. Here's Dimples with our chow." "Dimples?" Piacentelli asked as the girl came up with their tray. "Watch her when she walks away," Hartford suggested. "You must keep a carton of goat-glands under your bunk, Lee," Piacentelli said. "Marriage isn't all bad. I've done pretty well with Paula." Hartford nodded. Paula Piacentelli, a lieutenant in the Service Companies, was a pretty decent sort. "Where is she now?" he asked. "She'll be on the Status Board tonight," Piacentelli said. "You'll be in the Board Room with her. Lee, I've got a favor to ask you. As O.G. you'll be in charge tonight." "Paula will be in charge," Hartford said. "I'll be sleeping." "If I go outside, though, it will need your okay as well as Paula's," Piacentelli said. "Who's going outside with you?" "That's the sticky bit," Piacentelli said. "I'd like to go outside alone." "Want to run in the rain in your little bare skin?" Hartford asked. "Mix it up with a Stinker maiden? Paula wouldn't like that. Besides, you might get yourself jack-rolled by some Indigenous Hominid who doesn't like Axenites running his planet." "I want to work on my Kansan-Standard Dictionary," Piacentelli said. "Bug-dirt," Hartford said. "Don't tell lies." "All right, then," Piacentelli said. "I've got an idea that might lead to the most important discovery ever made on Kansas. Paula suggested it. I want to prove it." "Tell Nasty Nef about your idea," Hartford said, signalling the waitress for a second cup of stay-awake. "Give CINCK something clever to report when the supply ship lands, and you'll have your silver stripes before I will. Wouldn't Paula love that, though? Captain Piacentelli, I'd have to salute first." "Nasty Nef wouldn't consider our idea," Piacentelli said. "He wouldn't be happy to know that I've been studying the Kansan language, even. A common humanity between us Axenites and the Indigenous Hominids is a notion not welcome to the world of Colonel Nef. Brother Nef, I might say." Hartford leaned against the table to press a fist against Piacentelli's propped elbow. "Don't say that, Pia," he whispered. "I'm not political; I'm not interested; I don't care whether the Brotherhood even exists." "Yes, Virginia; there is a Brotherhood," Piacentelli said. "And our Nasty Nef is a Brother." "He's a number of things," Hartford said. "He's our CO; he's CINCK; he's an SOB. But he's our boss, and 'Brotherhood' is a dangerous word." He sipped his coffee. "Tell you what, Pia. If you want to go out and talk Gook with the Gooks, I'll fix it for you to draw picket duty tonight. The man who's got picket has been married only a month, and spent three weeks of that in a safety-suit out in the woods. I'm sure he'll relinquish to you the pleasure of a night's romp as picket officer." "Can you do it?" "An O.G. can do anything, during those hours when his superior officers are asleep," Hartford said. "You're a buddy," Piacentelli said. "I'll give you free tutoring in Kansan for the rest of our tour." "Do mo arigato gazaimashita," Hartford said. "Thanks to your mumbling the stuff in our room, I already talk like a Stinker." He stood up. "I'm going down to the Board Room. Pick your companion for picket, and come on down when you've dressed." Hartford bowed, Kansas-style. "Shitsurei itashimasu ga ..." he said politely, and left to assume his duties as O.G. III As one of the seventy-six male lieutenants of the Regiment, Hartford pulled O.G. about once every eleven weeks. His Terrible Third drew duty with him as Guard Platoon. All of them could expect to sleep through the night undisturbed, unless Nasty Nef held a dry-run, falling them out for a Simulated Problem. Nef was tired tonight, though; the Guard could sleep. Only the two men on picket and the handful of Service Company personnel on duty at the Status Board need stay awake tonight. Awake or sleeping, the security of First Regiment would rest this night in the hands of Lee Hartford. It was he who bore the final responsibility for allowing no living thing to enter the Barracks except in a well-scrubbed safety-suit; for assuring that the air his sleeping comrades breathed was sterile and dustless; that the Syphon's poisonous bug-juice was of the proper pH and germicidity; and for checking that the whereabouts of every Axenite on Kansas was reflected on the Status Board. That these duties were complex was attested by the assignment of a Service Company officer to the Board, a woman who would watch the Board's bands of lights and meters every moment. Hartford could sleep; he was the Responsible Male. Mrs. Paula Piacentelli, 1/Lt. S.C. (Gnotobiotics Spec.), had to remain awake: she was the Knowledgeable Woman. Hartford found Paula already at her work in the Board Room. Only a bit over five feet tall, Piacentelli's wife was concentrated woman of the most splendid sort. When Hartford had told her that Pia was taking the picket, she frowned. "I hope he doesn't plan anything foolish." "Me? Foolish?" Piacentelli demanded from the elevator. He walked up, clammed shut in his blue safety-suit, ready to hit bug-dirt. Under one arm he carried a package sheathed in opaque plastic. Behind him, in the gray safety-suit of an enlisted trooper, was a man Hartford recognized as Corporal Bond, machine-gunner from Pia's platoon. "Lieutenant Gabriel Piacentelli reporting with one man, Sir and Ma'am," he said, saluting his wife and Hartford. "At ease, Weenie-head," Hartford said. "With you and Bond on picket amidst the sunflowers, I won't sleep a wink all night." He turned to the corporal. "Did you sure-enough volunteer for this duty?" he asked. "Yes, sir!" Bond said. "I voluntarily assumed the duty of absorbing a fifth of Lt. Piacentelli's Class-VI Scotch. The Lieutenant was kind enough to reciprocate by offering me this tour." "He gave you Scotch?" Hartford turned to Piacentelli. "Gabe, for a jug of Scotch I'd have gone on picket with you myself. What's that you're taking outside with you? Lunch?" "A microscope," Piacentelli said. "I'm doing a little research for Paula." His wife nodded. A gnotobiotics technician, responsible for maintaining the bacteriological security of the Barracks, she had business with microscopes. "Want to give me the word on this romp of yours?" Hartford asked. "Standard picket, Lee," Piacentelli said. "I'll learn a little Kansan, take care of Paula's project and tell you all about it when we get back." "Let's see your weapons." Hartford inspected Bond's Dardick-rifle and Piacentelli's Dardick-pistol. Both weapons were loaded, clean and wrapped up for their trip through the Wet Gut in plastic sleeves. The trucks and heavy weapons stayed outside on bug-dirt. The lighter weapons and all ammunition came back inside the Barracks with the troopers who carried them. The weapons were detail-stripped on each re-entry, irradiated with u-v and fit with fresh sleeves. As had been discovered with the first axenic animals, in the 1930's, keeping a mammal germ-free is a formidable task. When that mammal is a human being and a soldier the job is double-tough. "Check out a jeep," Hartford said. "Report each half-hour. Don't shoot any Stinkers ... sorry, I mean Indigenous Hominids. Try not to hit a camelopard with the jeep; we're low on replacement parts. In fact, be careful. Okay, Pia?" "Done and done, Exalted One." Hartford dropped his voice. "I'd feel easier in my mind if I knew what's so important as to require your desertion of our mutual womb tonight, Pia." "Language study, you might say," Piacentelli replied. "Ha! So desa ka?" Hartford replied. "That's so much bug-dirt, and you know it." "Ha!" Piacentelli said. "See you at dawn. Take care of my wife, buddy." "Aren't you going to kiss her good night?" Hartford asked. Pia grinned through his clammed-shut helmet and clomped to the elevator with Bond. They were en route to the Hot Gut and the Wet Gut, the twisting hallway from the sterile First Regiment Barracks to the living night of Kansas. Hartford turned. Paula Piacentelli wore the short skirt, knee-hose and short-sleeved blouse of Pioneer green that was the Class B uniform for females inside the Barracks. She looked, Hartford thought, remarkably delectable; and he again congratulated his friend on his luck in getting her. He returned his attention to the Status Board, which Paula was conning. Two red lights flickered on above the ground-floor diagram of the Barracks, indicating that the two men of the picket had entered the Hot Gut. A moment later these lights blinked off, and two lighted over the diagram of the Wet Gut. Piacentelli and Bond were swimming now, towing their weapons in ballooning plastic sleeves. Sterile, on their way out into a filthy world, these two men were the outpost that would protect through the night their hundreds of brothers and sisters sleeping safe in utero. Freud, thou shouldst have lived this hour! Hartford mused. Piacentelli turned the ignition key of the jeep he'd chosen. With the starting cough of the engine, one of the rank of TV screens over the Status Board lighted. The camera eye was looking out the rear-view mirror of the jeep, and picked up Pia's helmeted head and the shoulder of his companion. "We're off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz!" Piacentelli sang. His wife spoke into the microphone before her. "Don't do anything foolish, Lieutenant," she said. "And remember, all transmissions are recorded and are audited, at random, by the Base Commander." "Transmission received, receiver contrite," Piacentelli reported back. "Okay, Paula-Darling. From now on till Bond and I swim home, we'll be as military as GI soap." He flicked the TV monitor around to look out the windshield and started the jeep down the road toward Stinkerville. The duty of the picket was to chug around outside at random, hitting all the cross-roads, settlements and high spots of the countryside near the Barracks; to interview late-riding Indigenous Hominids and inquire their business being out; to conduct such searches of Stinker homes and hideaways as might seem useful to the occupying Axenites; and to remain at all times in contact with the officers on duty at the Status Board. As the picket got underway, Hartford went down to the Terrible Third's area to check quickly through the two-man apartments. Knock on the door; "As you were, Troopers." A brisk inspection of two safety-suits, gaping beside their owners' bunks like firemen's boot-sheathed pants. The men were quiet. Guard-duty meant that any socializing with Service Company troopers was impossible for a night, and militated against any intake of alcoholic beverage. It was a bore, especially after three dry and womanless weeks in the field. Hartford visited his Platoon Sergeant last: "Sergeant Felix, could you have our bunch standing on bug-dirt ten minutes after I blew the whistle? Very well, then. Good night, Felix." Having demonstrated to his troopers that he was suffering the same strictures as they, Hartford went back to the O.G. cubicle in the Board Room. He checked his own safety-suit, his plastic-packaged Dardick-pistol, said good night to Paula Piacentelli and lay down to begin his first night's sleep outside a safety-suit in three weeks. But sleep didn't come easily. There was the murmur from the Board Room; Piacentelli's half-hourly reports. "Nothing to report, Paula. I'm at Road Junction (41-17). No I.H. activity. No excitement at all." "Continue random patrol, Lieutenant." "Yes, Dear. I'm going to run down to Kansannamura (42-19) for my next call-in." "Carry on, Lieutenant." Pia was in the best possible hands with Paula on duty, Hartford mused. The Status Board was really a woman's job. The girls of the Service Companies were the house-keepers of the Barracks, the guardians of the Regimental lares and penates. Paula, for example, had as her primary duty gnotobiotic control: the maintenance of the whole germ-free system of the Barracks, from the Hot-&-Wet Guts to safety-suit inspection and the upkeep of the Decontamination Vehicles. Behind the women on Board-duty, however, was always at least one male, combat-trained Officer of the Guard, ready (once awakened and briefed by the female help) to take armed men into the field. But meanwhile, Hartford wanted to sleep. Half an hour passed, and at its end Pia made his report: "Picket reporting, Paula. I'm going into the village. Corporal Bond will remain with the jeep, and will keep the transmitter open till I get back. Okay?" "Be careful, Lieutenant," Paula Piacentelli said, combining affection with military formality. Hartford, deciding that sleep was impossible, got up and cold-showered. Dressing in fresh Class B's, he walked out to join Paula at the Status Board. The TV screen showed Bond, the sheathed Dardick-rifle slung over his shoulder, pacing back and forth in front of the jeep, glancing from time to time toward the walls of Kansannamura, white in the light of the skyful of stars. He was nervous, evidently aware of the fact that Kansas was largely unexplored, her potential for midnight mayhem untested. Bond spoke across his shoulder. "The lieutenant has been gone for a quarter hour, Ma'am," he said. "Do you want me to go in and ask him to come out?" "Wait another quarter-hour, Corporal," Paula said. She explained to Hartford, "What he's got to do may take a little time." They watched the screen. Bond climbed back into the jeep, where he sat with his rifle between his knees, sweeping his attention around him, at the village, at the road behind, at the sunflower-fields, where the blossoms were bleached white and the leaves enameled black by starlight. With Paula's agreement, Hartford pressed the microphone-switch to talk with Bond. "Have you tried to tap Piacentelli on his suit-receiver, Corporal?" "Yes, sir," Bond said. "First thing. No answer." "Turn your bitcher full up, then," Hartford said. "Tell Lieutenant Piacentelli that the O.G. wants him out on the road within five minutes." "Done and done, sir." Bond tongued the bitcher's controls to Full Volume and repeated the message. Echoes bounced back from the walls of Stinkerville and lost themselves in the tangle of sunflowers. No one answered. The village seemed as much asleep as it had been before Bond's bellow. The Kansans were never hasty to volunteer response to Axenites; they knew that troopers meant trouble. "Piacentelli is busy at something," Hartford said, as much to reassure himself as Pia's wife. "I think I'll go out and have a look." He spoke to Bond: "Get out of the jeep, but stay close to it. Report any haps immediately. Watch for lights, listen for small-arms fire." "Done and done, sir." Hartford phoned Felix, his platoon sergeant. "Report to the Board Room to sub for me," he said. "Wake the Platoon Guide and tell him to stand ready to fall the Guard out, but not to wake anyone else yet. This is probably a nothing, Felix; Lt. Piacentelli just went for a walk in Stinkerville." The Command Light, top in the tier of all the hierarchy of red-yellow-green-white Status-Board indicators, flashed alive. "A nothing?" Nasty Nef's voice demanded. "What sort of talk is that, Lieutenant? If I've been properly interpreting the past five minutes' transmissions, we've got an Axenite officer stranded in the middle of a Stinker village. This, Mister, is not a nothing. Call out the Guard. Prepare to join me in a Stinkerville shakedown. Those Gooks got to learn they can't play fast-and-easy with Axenite troopers." "Done and done, sir!" Hartford snapped. He toggled the phone to get Felix back. "Felix, fall the boys out beside the Syphon. We've got the Old Man hitting bug-dirt with us, so look sharp." "The colonel's going out with us?" Felix asked. "Yes. There must be more to this situation than meets the company-grade eye," Hartford said. "Diaper-up our darlings and stand by in the Hot Gut, Felix." "Done and done!" Twenty seconds later a figure in Santa Claus red came clashing into the room. Hartford, half into his blue safety-suit, came to a clumsy attention. The newcomer, his helmet clammed shut all ready for contamination, bellowed, "Get with it, Mister!" "Yes, sir." Hartford fit himself into the suit, a sort of cockpit, a congeries of valves, gauges, counters and vetters. In a moment he'd sealed himself in the sterile suit, checked his air-filters and air reserve. "The Guard is assembled in the Hot Gut, sir, ready to take the field." "Dam' well better be," Nef said. "Lead off, Mister." He turned to Paula Piacentelli. "Send a Decontamination Vehicle after us, Lieutenant. No telling what those Stinker devils have cooked up with Piacentelli." Back to Hartford: "You're in command of the Guard, I'll observe and offer suggestions." "Tain-HUT!" Platoon Sergeant Felix saluted the scarlet-clad colonel and the blue-clad lieutenant as they stepped from the elevator into the electric atmosphere of the Hot Gut. The Guard snapped to, their plastic-packaged Dardick-rifles at order arms. "Take 'em out, Felix," Hartford said. "Two personnel carriers, a .50-caliber m.g.-mounted jeep fore and aft. You and the colonel take the rear jeep; I'll lead. Have the men unbag their weapons the instant we're outside. Any questions?" "No, sir." "Move out," Hartford said. IV The squads peeled off and double-timed down the Hot Gut. Man by man they dipped into the Wet Gut for their swim outside. They'd been drilled for speed in exiting. If the Regiment were needed outside, the Syphon could become a literal bottle-neck. As the last squad splashed into the antiseptic solution, Hartford turned to Colonel Nef. "Sir, I have a question," he said. "Hurry it up, Mister." "Isn't this a bit extreme, sir? We're going out to take one man out of a primitive village where we're not even sure he's in trouble. And we're carrying enough firepower to blast into an armed city." "I don't trust the Gooks," the colonel said. "Their bucolic way of life may be a fraud, designed to lull us into complacency. Tonight we may discover that they're plotting the overthrow of the Garrison, using weapons and tactics they've kept secret. I hope such is the case, Lieutenant. It would give us adequate cause to wipe the Stinkers off Kansas and make this as clean a world as Titan." "Sir...." "Move, Mister," Nef said. "Piacentelli has been in Stinkerville for fifty minutes. Let's get him out." The four trucks roared down the plateau toward the Indigenous Hominid hamlet at its foot. When the first Axenite Pioneers landed on the planet, bacteria-free as all men in space had to be, they'd set up camp near the spot where First Regiment Barracks now stood. They saw the fields of sunflowers, grown for food and cloth, and heard the natives call the nearest village Kansannamura. From that time on, this world was Kansas. There was no moonlight—Kansas has no moon—but the headlamps of the four vehicles were wasted against the bright ribbon of road, lighted as it was by the sheet of stars that melted together in a metallic ceiling over the night. The men sat with their rifles between their knees, the plastic sleeves stripped off. Each of these Dardick-rifles could fire a solid stream of death. Each round of ammunition was fitted with a matrix that served as chamber, cartridge and the first fraction-of-an-inch of barrel. A magazine of forty such rounds could be hosed through the rifle in half a second. The troopers sped downhill, through sunflower fields black and silver in the light of the stars. The personnel carriers and the jeeps scuffed to a halt by the village gate, the men scattering like shrapnel, according to the book. Colonel Nef spoke to Hartford on the command-band. "Move in, Lieutenant. Bring out Piacentelli. Any Stinker resistance is to be treated as open rebellion." "Yes, sir." Hartford spoke to his men: "First squad, lead scout, forward to the gate." The scout, his plastic safety-suit and the glass of his helmet glinting highlights, scuttled to the gate. He kicked the gate open—Piacentelli had evidently left it ajar—and entered, rifle-first. "First squad, follow me in column. Open to Line-of-Skirmishers in the square. Second squad, follow in the same manner. Third squad; maintain your interval and stand ready." Hartford ran, pistol in hand, through the open gate. It was like charging some Roman ruin unpeopled for three centuries, like a field exercise with boulders marking obstacles to be won. There was no sign of natives. Their shop-boards hung bearing the picture-script the Kansans used, quiet as the marbles in a cemetery. Hartford directed first squad in a sweep through the alleys, searching for Piacentelli. Second squad clattered through the gate behind them, took up a skirmish line, and moved in to cover the square as first squad disappeared into the doorways and alleys of Stinkerville. The village, except for its beasts, might have been deserted. These animals, camelopards used for riding and to carry burdens, woke and gazed serenely down at the interrupters of their vegetable dreams, blinking their liquid half-shuttered eyes. Boots clattered on cobblestones. The houses were unlighted. "Throw on your i-r," Hartford ordered. As they moved into the dark, narrow ways, the men beamed infra-red light from the projectors on their safety-suits, the bounced-back, invisible light being transduced to black-and-green chiaroscuro by passage through the stereatronic goggles dropped inside their helmets. "Turn the Stinkers out, Mister," Nef command-banded. "Into the houses," Hartford signaled. Ahead, a boot slammed wood, and hinges burst. To the restless night sounds of the camelopards in their stalls, the click of military boots on brick, and the rustle of rifles against safety-suits was added the whispering of families rousing from their beds. Hand in hand from father to mother to elder brother, down the scale to the youngest, the Kansans stumbled out into their little courtyards. "Ano hito wa dare desu ka?" "Abunai yo!" "Shikata ga nai...." "Any sign of Piacentelli yet?" Nef demanded. "Not yet, sir," Hartford signalled. "Feed a candle into every building, Lieutenant. We'll get these Gooks in the open and interrogate till we find our man." "Done and done, sir," Hartford said, stepping out of the way of a little girl fleeing toward the village square with an even littler girl strapped to a pack-board on her back. He passed on the order. "Fire in ten seconds, nine, eight ... now!" Each man of first squad tossed a Lake Erie Lightning Universal Gas Candle through the window nearest him. A little over a second later a dozen grenades spit out a cloud of smoke with a hiss like a bursting fire-hose, and the outer air was filled with an eye-stinging gas. The Indigenous Hominids spilled out of their homes in all directions now; coughing, choking, children rubbing the smoke particles into their half-wakened eyes. Two camelopards, blinded like their masters, blundered into the square, tears streaming from their reproachful eyes, twelve feet above the pavement. Second squad's men danced clear of the beasts and hallooed them out the gate. Somewhere back in an alley a first-squad trooper tapped his trigger, jetting steel against overhanging roof-tiles. "Nail that shot, Mister!" Nef demanded. Hartford heard the squad leader: "It's Lieutenant Piacentelli, sir. He's here." "Bring him out, man; bring him out!" Nef's excited voice triggered a new string of rifle bursts. Hartford tongued his bitcher full-volume: "Cease fire, you idiots! Piacentelli, head for the square." "Stop it, for God's sake, stop it!" Piacentelli shouted, his unamplified voice coming from a smoke-filled alley. Hartford plunged into the dark smoke—a tear-gas grenade had set afire some of the sun-flower-paper room dividers, and kindled with them a row of wooden houses—and shouted for Piacentelli. A blabrigar, as blind in the smoke as the men, blundered against Hartford's helmet. "Yuke! Yuke!" the bird screamed, grabbing hold of the transceiver-antenna that horned up from the helmet. Hartford grabbed the blabrigar and tossed it up above the melee. He heard it flying in circles, searching for its Stinker owners, chanting the last words they'd said to it: "Yuke! Yuke! Yuke!"—"Go!" Everything was burning. Even through the safety-suit Hartford suffered from the heat. He retracted his i-r goggles, useless in all this smoke. Nef called. "I'm coming in, Mister." Hartford acknowledged. Great. One more blind man wandering in the smoke was what he needed. He tongued his bitcher loud and shouted; "Gabe! Come this way. Gabe! Gabe!" The heat was intolerable. He positive-pressured his suit, ballooning the fabric away from his skin. How hot, he wondered, would the rounds packed into the butt of his Dardick-pistol have to get before they exploded? As though in answer, a snap of gunfire sounded from the fog ahead. Some meat-head had spooked. There were more shots as other troopers fired at their fantasies. "Cease fire, damn it!" Nef shouted over the command-circuit. "If anyone was hurt by you idiots, I'll court-martial every man with smoke in his gun barrel." Hartford hurried on. Ahead of him in the alley he heard Colonel Nef's voice, uncharacteristically soft. "Hartford, join me. I've found Piacentelli." Ahead in the smoke was a pinkness: the scarlet-suited commander kneeling above a body on the bricks. Here in the open of planetary air, available to all the microscopic beasts of Kansas, Piacentelli was wearing only Class B's; his sneakers, shorts and tee-shirt. The center of the shirt sopped blood from the bullet-hole that funneled into Axenite Lieutenant Piacentelli's chest. Nef stood. "The Decontamination Vehicle should be standing by," he said. "Get Piacentelli outside. We may be able to save him." He sounded unhopeful. Hartford draped his friend's body across his shoulder. The smoke was bad, but he'd memorized his course through it. The air sucked in through his filter was clean, but hot. His helmet steamed opaque. As he stumbled out, blind, but guided by the colonel's voice, two men came forward to take Piacentelli over to the Decontamination Vehicle parked by the village gate. In the cooler air Hartford's helmet cleared. A girl gnotobiotician from the Decontamination Squad pressed the pickup of her helmet's "ears" against Piacentelli's bloody chest. She looked up. "He's dead, sir," she said. Nef's voice boomed from his bitcher. "Burn the Stinker village!" he shouted. "These Gooks will pay for Piacentelli's death with their homes." Hartford felt imminent danger of vomiting, bad business in a safety-suit. He fought it as he looked around. The column of smoke rising from the buildings already fired was sweeping around, carried by the morning wind that poured off the plateau. Everything within the walls of the rammed-earth houses would be incinerated. Kansannamura was destroyed. "Regroup by the vehicles," Hartford spoke to his troopers. He walked back to his jeep, the village flaming behind him. The Decontamination Squad checked Hartford's safety-suit, and found it sound despite its roasting. Piacentelli they cocooned in plastic: he was contaminated and dangerous. As the five trucks rolled back toward the Barracks, they met families of Indigenous Hominids, smoke-stained, who retreated back into the sunflower-fields as the troopers drew near them. The Stinkers seemed to have salvaged little from the flames beyond an occasional blabrigar, perched on an old man's shoulder, or now and then a camelopard, fitted with a saddle and carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle of clothing and cooking-pots. V Hartford had to see Piacentelli's body placed in the Barracks morgue, where a necropsy would be performed by a safety-suited gnotobiotician. It was seldom that an Axenite was contaminated. Rarer yet was the death of a trooper who'd been exposed to bacteria. Information held in Pia's body might someday save lives. Hartford, directing the sealing-off of the morgue from the rest of the Barracks, was not comforted by these reflections. He unsuited, shaved and showered, and put on fresh Class B's to finish what remained of this O.G. tour. On his way back up to the Board Room he had to pass the morgue again. Colonel Nef, in the midst of a cluster of lesser ranks, was there. On a wheeled cart, covered by a sheet, was a second body. Hartford stopped. "What happened, sir?" he demanded. "Who is it?" Nef raised the corner of the sheet with a hand that seemed infinitely weary. The body was Paula Piacentelli. "Another accident," the Colonel grunted. A hydroponics corporal, S.C., spoke up. "She was relieved of duty as soon as she heard about her husband's death, sir. Someone should have stayed with her. She went up to Level Eight to be alone. There are only two of us on duty there through the night. She must have blundered off the walkway, blinded by her tears. However it happened, she caught hold of a lighting-cable where the insulation was frayed, and was electrocuted the moment she touched the wet seeding-bed. Colonel Nef found her there." "I was going to console her on Gabriel Piacentelli's death," Nef said. "Leave the body here and clear out, all of you." No refrigeration was needed for Paula's corpse, of course. An uncontaminated Axenite was preserved by purity. The body might dry a bit, the integrity of the internal organs suffer somewhat from the corrosive effects of their own juices: but Paula's corpse would otherwise remain uncorrupted until taken outside and buried in bug-dirt. "Hartford," Nef said, "I'd like to have a talk with you." "I'm still on O.G., sir," Hartford said. "And I relieve you of that duty," Nef snapped. "Come up to my quarters." Nasty Nef's sitting-room had the only window in the Barracks, a skylight through which poured the brilliance of Kansas's pyrotechnic flood of stars. "Rest, Hartford. Sit down. Brandy?" Hartford allowed that he could use some. "What do you think of tonight's adventure, Lee?" Nef asked. "Don't look startled. I know the first name of every officer and non-com in the Regiment." "What happened, sir, was horrible," Hartford said. "I understand your feelings," Nef said. "Two tragic accidents, killing your two closest friends the same night. I am certain that the loss of these comrades will fire your zeal for getting the Stinkers under control. Isn't that right, Lee?" Nef took a cigar from the humidor next his chair. "With all respect, sir," Hartford said, placing his empty brandy-glass on the table to his right, "I can hardly see how the events tonight were caused by the Indigenous Hominids." "You must use the official name for the Gooks, mustn't you?" Nef mused. His voice turned harsh: "Someone stripped the safety-suit off Piacentelli, Mister." Hartford nodded, his face pale. The "A" of the Axenite's alphabet was Apprehension. As a germ-free—axenic, gnotobiotic—human being, he is superior in most ways to ordinary men. He's usually larger and stronger. He never has dental caries, pimples, appendicitis, the common cold or certain cancers. No matter how much or how long he sweats, the Axenite doesn't stink; nor do his other excretions. On a contaminated world, however, the Axenite is a tender flower indeed. A baby's breath can be death to him, if that baby be a "normal" human; for no microbe is benign to the man without antibodies. To him a drop of rain may reek with pestilence, the scent of evening may be a lethal gas. "I can't understand their stripping Pia, sir," he said. "Why would they do such a terrible thing?" "Because they're Stinkers!" Nef said. "Can you imagine what it must be like to be one of them? Every inch of your skin a-crawl with living filth, your guts packed with foulness, your whole frame a compromise with rottenness? Do you wonder that they'd delight to make us as unwholesome as they are themselves?" Colonel Nef lighted the cigar he'd been mulling. "Lee, do you think one Stinkerville destroyed is too high a price for them to pay for having murdered two Axenite troopers? For Piacentelli's wife is as much their victim as her husband." Hartford shook his head. "I'm not sure, sir. What bothers me more than anything else is that it's my fault Pia went out last night. He asked me to arrange for him to replace the scheduled picket officer, and I did." "Lee, why was Piacentelli so anxious to pull this extra duty?" Nef asked. Hartford tried unobtrusively to squirm his chair out of the jet-stream from Nef's cigar. "He told me he wanted to work on the language, sir," he said. "Pia really had such a project. He'd never had contact with anyone with a speech other than Standard before, and the problem of transducing one language into another fascinated him. The Kansans call their speech Nihon-go. Pia taught me to understand some of it." "A waste of your time, Lee," Nef said. "You'll never have occasion to speak it. Be that as it may, unless Piacentelli was attempting to coax a course in Bedroom Kansan from a Stinker maiden, I can hardly understand why his lexigraphical labors should require him to unsuit himself. No, Piacentelli was deliberately murdered." "I'm puzzled, sir," Hartford admitted. "When we tossed those smoke-candles, I heard Pia shouting for us to stop it. Would he have done so if the Indigenous Hominids had him captive? Why did none of the natives lift a hand against us, though we were burning their homes? Why did Paula Piacentelli seem to know why Pia was going outside tonight? Why did he take a microscope with him? Why did Paula kill herself?" "Don't noise that last 'why' around the Barracks, Mister," Nef growled. "Officially, she died in tear-blinded grief, an accident." He smiled. "Whatever our reason for burning out Stinkerville, Lee, we got it done. The fact that those half-humans down the hill bred and sweat and poisoned the soil within half an hour's walk has been a stench in my nostrils ever since we got here. Now they're gone. I'm as sorry as you that the Piacentellis are dead. But the manner of their dying was such as to assure Axenic mankind a new home." "I'm not sure I understand you, sir." Nef poured them each a second brandy. He raised his; Hartford of necessity followed suit. "To Brotherhood," the colonel said. He stared into Hartford's eyes. "To the Brotherhood," he amended. Hartford was tired, confused and in awe of Nef's rank; otherwise he might have ventured protest. Nef sipped his drink. "I must emphasize, Lee, that what I say is my opinion only, not Axenite policy. You see my point." "I do, sir," Hartford said. "Forgive me, then, for prefacing my remarks with a bit of truism," Nef said. "In all history before gnotobiotic man was cut from his mother through cellophane, the human being was never pure organism. Before us, every man who ever lived was, in fact, one mammal plus the sum of millions of viruses, rickettsia, bacteria, fungi and molds. When the old philosophers asked, 'What is man?' the answer could only be: 'Foul smell and blood in a bag.' We're the first men beyond that, Lee. The first real men, True Men, members of the winner-species. Homo gnotobioticus. "We must destroy the bridge that led to us. We must destroy the Stinkers. Not just these quasi-human natives here on Kansas, but the Stinkers on Earth, and on every other planet where bug-laden man has followed Axenite. What chance has Homo sapiens to match his sapiency against Homo gnotobioticus, when he is a bifurcate septic tank, a polyculture of a thousand kinds of living dirt?" Hartford finished his brandy, wishing he were anywhere else than in Nasty Nef's quarters, tired, ill at ease and a little drunk from the two brandies. "What do you propose, sir?" he asked with Academy politeness. "Aha!" Nef rejoiced, pouring them each another drink. "You justify my trust, Lee. You perceive that I speak not merely if-ly, philosophically, but as a man of action, leashed only by temporary practicality." He leaned back in his chair and regarded Hartford more as a sculptor might regard a recent product than a father a son, with uncritical approval. "Where were you born, Lee?" "On Titan, sir." "I thought so. You have the mark of natal excellence," Nef said. "You're a second or third-generation Axenite, then?" "Third, sir," Hartford said. "Splendid. Your grandparents were from their mothers' wombs untimely ripp'd; your parents and yourself born normally, in germ-free ambience. How fortunate we are, you and I! Third-generation Axenites. Eff-two of a new race." Nef paused in his recital. "There is one fact that chafes us, though. We, perforce the Columbuses of tomorrow, explorers of the planets beyond even the stars we see here on the frontier, are held back by our Stinker cousins. They have the proper feeling, that only pure man might pioneer the alien worlds, for fear of destroying what he finds there. But who will inherit those planets when we've finished our explorations? Who will at the last till the fields of Kansas?" "Colonists from Earth, sir," Hartford said. "From Eurus, Tinkle, Westside, Unashamed, T'ang, Williams's World and Hope. From all the planets normal man has colonized." "Doesn't that annoy you, Lee?" Nef asked. "That our work's fruit is to be enjoyed by shiploads of Stinkers?" "They're as human as we, sir," Hartford said. He smiled. "You might say they just haven't had our advantages." "You're tender-minded, Lee," Nef said. "We garrison a hundred worlds on the Frontier, planets our Stinker masters mustn't visit yet, least Man contaminate some life-form yet unmet. We pioneer, clear planets as safe, and move on. For reward, we Axenites have three worlds of our own in the M'Bwene System, axenized for our use; we have the Academies on Luna and Titan, and a dome on Pluto. It's not enough. We are the new men, the next-comers to humanity. We must have worlds of our own. I, and the Brotherhood whose hand here I am, intend that Kansas shall be ours." "What about the Stinkers?" Hartford asked. "What will happen to them if we decide to axenize Kansas?" "Maybe they'll leave," Colonel Nef said, smiling in the manner that had won him the name "Nasty." "A few more punitive expeditions like tonight's—an incendiary grenade was thrown at Kansannamura, did you know that, Lee? I threw it—and we'll have no Stinkers underfoot. We soon will be able to mop and polish this world to our own high standards. We'll walk this lovely world without safety-suits and breathe unfiltered air. We'll enter into our birthright, Lee." Nef gazed at his cigar admiringly, though it had gone out. "So much for the moment, Brother Hartford," he said. "Perhaps we'd both do well to get some sleep." Hartford jumped to attention and formally requested permission to withdraw. Nef nodded. Hartford about-faced and left the room. VI The things the colonel had told him hadn't fallen into place in his mind yet. Hartford was numb of thought. Back in his own room in B.O.Q. the numbness cleared a bit. He poured himself a drink. Somehow, he thought, he'd become fairhaired boy to an Attila the Hun, an Alaric the Goth, a Hitler, a Haman; an Ashurbanipal I, a Rameses II. For Nef was equally with these a servant of Siva the Destroyer, with his plan to make Man pure. His purification would involve the destruction of all non-axenic men and women all the way from the Home World to the newest beach-head on the Frontier; the sterilization of a hundred worlds as culture media for the new race; and the planting on the newly axenized soil of colonies of Homo gnotobioticus, the feeder-on-hydroponic-greens, the inodorous, the thin-gutted, the strong toothed Superman. Nef's pogrom had begun with the raid on the village, Hartford mused, his arms behind his head as he lay on his bunk. Nef had decided that this green and pleasant world belonged to the silver men, the true men, the new men. Us, Hartford thought. Earth's Stinkers, ordinary humanity with its common cold and its caries, would follow the Kansan Indigenous Hominid, and the Great Auk, into history. The double funeral of the Lieutenants Piacentelli was to be held at Retreat, outside the Barracks. Hartford wondered a bit at the haste with which the two bodies were to be consigned to the earth of Kansas. Perhaps haste was necessary because of the micro-organisms with which poor Pia's corpse was necessarily contaminated. Hartford grimaced. Contaminated humans must lead disgusting lives. They smelled of ferments, were bloated with bacterially elaborated gases, suffered rot in their very teeth. Their corpses—poor forefathers!—suffered corruption that would never touch an Axenite, whose unembalmed cadaver would last longer than the best-mummified Pharaoh. Whatever mysterious errand it had been that had taken Piacentelli outside the Barracks, it had killed him. It was over. Hartford marched the Terrible Third into position facing the graves, cut into the soil at the base of the hundred-foot flagpole. The entire regiment, less only the handful of men and women necessary to secure the Barracks, was on the Parade Ground. Colonel Nef, his scarlet safety-suit brilliant in the light of the setting sun, stood beside the graves, a finger of his right gauntlet inserted to mark his place in the black Book of Honors and Ceremonies. The regiment stood at parade-rest as a truck brought the bodies of two comrades through its ranks. As the improvised hearse halted and twelve blue-suited casket-bearers stepped forward to lift the flag-draped boxes, Nef called the regiment to attention. The bearers slow-marched the caskets to the graves and placed them on the lowering-devices. Nef's words of funeral were few. He spoke of the dedication of the two Axenites being laid to rest and bitterly accused the Stinkers—this word seemed rude, in so formal a setting—of having murdered the young couple. He spoke of condign justice, and of revenge. This done, he called: "Escort, less firing-party. Present, HAHMS! Firing-party, FIRE THREE VOLLEYS!" The shots of the Dardick-rifles echoed down the plateau to the smoldering village below. The Regimental Bugler, standing between the heads of the graves, flicked on his instrument. As the last volley spat from the muzzles of the rifles, the bugler played Taps. Four men stepped forward to recover and fold the green-silk Pioneer colors, and the caskets were lowered to corruption in alien earth. The banner crept down the flagstaff, and the funeral was over. Bone-weary, Hartford went from the Syphon to the refresher-room, where he checked his safety-suit and hung it. Another officer was there, still in his blue safety-suit. Hartford wondered sleepily why he'd so long postponed unsuiting. Even the fellow's helmet was sealed. "Our first deaths on Kansas," Hartford remarked, wanting to coax the man into conversation and learn who he was. "I'd never realized till now that we're really soldiers, subject to violent death and formal burying." The man must be a replacement, come in on the supply ship a month ago, Hartford thought. Black hair, crewcut. Tanned. Must be from one of the M'Bwene Worlds, where an Axenite's naked skin can bear unfiltered sunlight. "Both the Piacentellis were my friends," Hartford said, determined to coax speech from the stranger. The man's bitcher boomed, evidently set on full volume. "Mattaku shirazu," he said. "Excuse. Pia not teach entire use of Standard tongue." Hartford's right hand tore through the plastic pellicle over his Dardick-pistol and brought the weapon to bear on the figure before him. "You're a Stinker!" he said. "Pia's safety-suit—that's the suit you're wearing." "Tonshu," the Indigenous Hominid said, bowing his head. He indicated the empty holster at his side: he was unarmed. "I come on taku, here to your honored precincts, to speak of things done and of future things. You are Hartford?" Hartford thought quickly. His responsibility was to the Garrison. This stranger was above all else a possible source of contamination, a carrier of the micro-bugs that could kill every Axenite on Kansas. Shooting him would rupture the safety-suit he wore. As it was, his exterior surface was clean; he could have entered the Barracks only by marching in from Retreat with the rest of the regiment, through the sterilizing Syphon. "I am Hartford. Lee Hartford." "Pia said you are a good man," the stranger said, bowing. "What is your name?" "Renkei. As you say, I take Pia's uwa-zutsumi, this smooth garment." Renkei indicated the safety-suit by slicking his hands over it. "I must enter here to talk with Hartford. To enter, I must have garment. Pia, my brother, is dead. I borrowed his garment. Can I, with you, stop the ugly thing that began last night in Kansannamura? Kuwashiku wa zonzezu; I do not know. I can but try." What a perfect disguise a safety-suit made, Hartford thought. Besides, it was the only passport a man needed to enter the Barracks. He stared at the stranger. He looked no different to men Hartford had met before, Axenites whose grandparents had been born by aseptic Caesarian section in Nagoya or Canton, two of the great gnotobiotic centers of fifty years ago. Renkei was a Stinker, a Kansan, an Indigenous Hominid (ignominious name!); he was also, Hartford felt, a man. "Tell me why you made the dangerous journey here, into the midst of your enemies," he said. "The death of our friend Pia. The burning of Kansannamura. The war between my people and you who wear smooth garments," he said. "This is aru-majiki koto." "A thing that ought not to be," Hartford said, translating. He was glad for the practice he'd gotten with Pia, speaking the native tongue. "Sit down," he said. "You must explain, Renkei." The refresher-room, a hall filled with lockers and the machinery that automatically tested and refitted the safety-suits each time they returned to the Barracks, had a dozen entrances and exits. As Renkei, still completely sealed in Pia's safety-suit, sat on the bench beside Hartford, the doors all closed at once. They hissed as the pneumatic seals were set in their frames. Contamination Alert! Someone, most likely the Service girl on watch at the Status Board, had discovered that there was one more person in the Barracks than could be accounted for. A crash-priority head-count had been made. Each room and compartment had doubtless been eavesdropped through the built-in TV eyes and microphone ears. One door at the far end of the hall burst open. A squad of safety-suited Service Police spilled in. At the point of their wedge was the scarlet uniform of Colonel Nef. Dardick-pistol in hand, he ran toward Renkei. "Don't shoot!" Hartford shouted, springing up. "Get back, Mister," the colonel yelled. He dropped to one knee and squeezed all twelve rounds into the seated figure to Hartford's right. Service Police swooped down to pull Hartford away from the shattered body of Renkei. The lieutenant's tee-shirt was stained, however, by flecks of blood splashed up as the SPs' bullets chewed into the Kansan. Hartford was contaminated. For the next hour, Hartford had no more to say about his disposition than an angry bullock being dipped and scrubbed against an epidemic of cattle ticks. His purification consisted in a sudsing with antiseptic soaps, this administered by a team of three Service Company gnotobioticians who were completely indifferent to his modesty and who seemed determined to peel off the outer surface of his skin. The women, safety-suited against being themselves contaminated, shaved off all his hair and ostentatiously packaged-up the shavings to be burned. They administered parenteral and enteric doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics. By the time the gnoto girls were finished, Hartford was as bald all over as a six-weeks foetus, as sore as though he'd been sand-blasted, slightly feverish as a result of the injections and madder than hell. Ignoring his demands to see Colonel Nef at once, the Service Company troopers helped him into his safety-suit. Hartford would have to live inside the suit for a week's quarantine, watched carefully to see whether a missed microbe would breed within him in spite of all the measures taken. Hartford's company commander refused him permission to speak to the colonel. The lieutenant was to speak to no one concerning Renkei's invasion of the Barracks. He would remain safety-suited inside the Barracks or out; but would otherwise continue with his regular duties. Hartford returned to the refresher-room where the murder had taken place. Renkei's macerated body had been removed for burning. The room had been carefully decontaminated, to the extent of hosing it down with detergent steam and individually re-refreshing each safety-suit in the huge hall's rows of lockers. There was nothing to be done against Nef's madness, Hartford thought. He sat on the bench where Renkei had sat. The ultimate breakdown in communication is silencing one side of the dialogue, he thought. That's why killing a man is the ultimate sin; it removes forever the hope of understanding him. It ends for all time the conversation by which brothers may touch one another's mind. What crap to find in a soldier's thoughts, Hartford told himself. He was an Axenite trooper, a Pioneer, a pistol-packing officer of infantry, commander of the Terrible Third Platoon. He was an Axenite, dedicated by the immaculacy of his birth to the conquest of Man's frontiers. Hartford snapped his plastic-sheathed Dardick-pistol, death in a supermarket wrapper, from his belt and placed it on the shelf of his locker. He'd seen the village of Kansannamura burned. Pia had died across his shoulder. Paula lay buried, too. Renkei's life had been splashed out on a stream of bullets. Enough of death. Hartford picked up a pack of field-ration squeeze-tubes and walked down the hallway toward the Syphon. His leaving would show on the Status Board, of course, but that didn't matter any more. He was deserting the regiment. He walked through the valley of desert that was the Hot Gut, and down into the birth-canal that was the Wet Gut, to emerge in the evening air of Kansas. The motor sergeant, stationed outside to guard the vehicles, saluted. "Going for a walk, sir?" he asked. "If you'll lend me a jeep, I'll go for a ride," Hartford said. "I'd like to see how things look, down in the village." "It's against regulations, but if you'll have the truck back by dark I can let it go, sir." "Thank you, Sergeant." Hartford returned the salute and drove off downhill, toward Kansannamura. What would happen to Hartford-the-deserter? he wondered. At best, he'd be booted out of the troopers and grounded on Titan, or Luna or one of the M'Bwene planets, to serve the rest of his life as a paper-pusher, the bureaucratic equivalent of an endless Kitchen Police. At worst, he'd be exiled to Earth. That meant exposure to bacteria, a gradual contamination till he'd been exposed to the full dirtiness in which earthlings daily lived, till he'd equipped himself with antibodies and a Stinker's immune-response. The Service Police would be after him soon. Once out of sight of the Barracks, he turned his jeep off the road, onto one of the numberless paths used by camelopard riders on their trips between Stinker villages. He was headed upgrade, now, toward the mountains. On either side of the jeep were the fields of sunflowers, silent in the twilight calm. In a few moments the cool winds from the sea would flow into the land, stirring the billions of heart-shaped sunflower-leaves into the whisper that filled the evening and early-morning hours of Kansas. His heart filled with hope and hopelessness, feeling like a happy suicide, Hartford sang to himself as the sunflower heads and leaves tattooed against his windshield. Pioneers! O Pioneers he sang, the anthem of the Axenites, the fellowship he was leaving forever: Lo, the darting bowling orb! Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets, All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers! The crunching of the jeep over the narrow track, the whipping of the plants against the vehicle and his singing all combined to drown out whatever noise it was the girl might have made. Hartford didn't see her till the jeep, rearing like a startled pony, climbing the flank of the camelopard the girl rode, tossed him into a tangle of green stalks and golden flowers. VII The riding camelopard bleated only a moment and was dead, its great neck broken by the jeep's charge. The girl, thrown clear, was up before Hartford. A scarlet bird circled the scene of the wreck, the dead beast, the stalled jeep, the man and the woman sprawled by the side of the path. "Miyo! Miyo! Miyo!" cried the blabrigar: "See! See! See!" Hartford rose and went to the girl, who was rubbing the shoulder she'd landed on. She stared, but didn't back away. "Kinodoku semban," he said very carefully: a thousand-myriad pardons. His bitcher, unfortunately, was set on full volume; his words of comfort blatted at the girl with parade-ground force. She put her hands over her ears. The blabrigar above them, impressed by Hartford's stentorian voice, circled repeating "Kinodoku semban" over and over, till the girl called it down to rest quietly on her shoulder. The girl spoke to the bird, which stared at her lips with his head cocked to one side, an attentive student. She repeated four times the same message. The bird nodded, and repeated the phrase to her. "Yuke!" the girl said. The blabrigar spread its scarlet wings and flew up. It circled twice, then headed north, up into the mountains. Of the girl's message Hartford had understood only the native word for camelopard: giraffu. His Kansan was inadequate. He could understand it only if it were slowly spoken. Hartford tongued his bitcher's controls to a conversational level. "Kinodoku semban," he repeated, bowing. The girl knelt beside the dead camelopard and stroked its head, over the central, vestigal horn. She looked up at Hartford with tears in her eyes. "Tonshu," Hartford said: I bow my head. "Anata we dare desu ka?" she asked. "Lee Hartford," he replied. The girl spoke slowly. "I am named Take." She knit her hands before her and bowed. "Forgive my bad actions," she said. "The fault is entirely mine, Takeko," Hartford replied. He was sorry, of course, to have killed the girl's steed and to have subjected her to danger; he was very glad to have met her. Takeko wore what must have been the Kansan riding costume: short trousers and a jacket woven of floss from retted sunflower stalk, dyed a golden brown. Most curious, he thought, was her perfume; mild, flowerlike, slightly pungent. The smell of this lovely Stinker belied the trooper epithet. Then it hit him. The filters of a safety-suit remove, together with all the dust of the ambient air, all its character, including odor. The clean, characteristic smells of the Barracks, together with the bland spit-and-sweat odors of a long-worn safety-suit, were all an Axenite came in contact with. If he were able to smell the outside world, it could only be because his gnotobiotic security was compromised. Hartford inspected his safety-suit, peering where he could and twisting and feeling the surfaces he couldn't see. Takeko laughed. She reached across his shoulder and lifted a flap of torn fabric, ripped loose when Hartford had flown from his jeep. His panic would have been unmanly in a normal human; but Hartford all his life had been impressed with the horror of contamination. He ran blindly, though he knew that his deepened breathing was drawing the germ-laden air of Kansas deeper into his lungs. He ran through lanes of sunflowers, flailing his arms, into the darkness, away from the alien girl, away from the fear of going septic. He ran and stumbled and fell and ran again. All his life he'd been warned of the consequences of becoming infected with the bacteria against which he had no defenses. Now he was so infected. When Hartford fell the last time it was for sheer lack of wind. He opened his helmet and tossed it aside. Dead already, he could lose nothing by making himself comfortable for dying. He shivered. The chill of infection? No, the night was cool. He looked about him in the light of the sky of stars. The fields were below him, rustling in a million private conversations as the breeze filtered through them. It was a lovely place to die, here on the crest of a hill. Hartford lay back and stared into the curtain of stars that rippled above him. Perhaps he wouldn't wake, he thought. With this thought he slept. The sunlight stung his eyes. He sprang to his feet, then bent and groaned. Sore. He'd slept on naked soil, packed hard by the hillcrest winds. He stretched his hard-bedded muscles. For a dead man, he felt good. The alien bacteria and viruses within him were establishing beachheads, multiplying their platoons to companies, their companies to battalions. By the time they'd reached division-strength, he thought, he'd be well aware of the invasion. Meanwhile, breakfast. He opened a package of field-rations, squeeze-tube beans. He inserted the nozzle of the tube into his mouth and fed himself a dollop of the stuff. It felt strange to eat directly from the tube, not having inserted the adjutage into his helmet-opening to be sterilized first. Being septic saved a lot of time. He finished the squeeze-tube beans and was thirsty. Down at the base of his hill was a little stream. Hartford thoughtfully peeled off his safety-suit. Dressed only in his shorts, shirtless, barefoot and tender, he made his way down to the water. It was delicious. Did bacteria impart that brisk taste? Hartford wondered. So far committed to contamination that nothing mattered, he shed his shorts and dived into the stream. It was chilly, delightful. He returned to shore and lay on the grass for the sun to toast him dry. He began to relax.... The girl giggled. Hartford snatched up his shorts and pulled them on. It was Takeko. She was afoot, wearing the costume he'd last seen her with; but she had strapped on her back a leather wallet. A blabrigar sat on Takeko's shoulder. She spoke to it, repeating her message four times and listening to the bird repeat once. Then she shooed the scarlet bird away, to carry north the message that Hartford had been found. "I laugh. Excuse me," she said. "But you funny." Takeko patted her head. Hartford understood. Shaved by the Decontamination Squad, he was bald and eyebrowless, entirely lacking in body hair. He smiled. "Hai." "Your skin is like the hide of a giraffu," she said. Hartford looked down at his freckled arm. True, the pattern of brown against pink was very like the reticulations of a camelopard. "Where did you learn to speak Standard, Takeko?" "Pia-san talked to my cousin, and I listened," she said. "Kansannamura was my home. Pia often visited us." Hartford, who after Nasty Nef was the man most responsible for the burning of Takeko's village, was silent. "When your jeepu-kuruma hit my giraffu, I think you are Renkei," the Kansan girl said. "Renkei is my cousin. He go to see what can be done." "Renkei is dead," Hartford told her. "Iie!" Takeko pressed her hands against her face. "You strangers are quick to kill, to burn, to sweep away." "I did not wish him harmed," Hartford said. "You pink folk will not be happy until all our people are dead and under the ground," Takeko moaned. "You will not be pleased until you can march across our graves." "That is not so." "Pia-san said it," Takeko said. "He said that your Nef is a master of the Brotherhood, which wishes death to all people who do not wear glass heads." "If that is true, I am no longer a part of it, Takeko-san," Hartford said. "I have left Nef and his Barracks. I am a dead man." "You will come with me," Takeko said. "You will not be dead for many years, unless Nef and his Brotherhood kill you." She looked into the sky, where a red bird was circling. It hawked down to her shoulder and sat there, its head tilted to her. "Takeko," the girl said to the bird. With this key to unlock its message the blabrigar spilled its rote. Hartford recognized a word or two of the bird-o-gram, but not the full sense of the message. Takeko reached into the pocket of her short trousers for a few zebra-striped sunflower-seeds. The blabrigar picked these daintily from her hand, using its beak like a pair of precise tweezers, pinching up one seed at a time and cracking it. "There will soon come giraffu to take us to a further village," Takeko said. "You are to speak to our chief men there, to tell them what happened to Renkei, why he was killed in the Stone House." "I may not live through this day," Hartford said. "It is not easy to explain. We wear the 'glass head' to keep out your air. It is deadly, doku, to us. Do you understand, Takeko?" "You may be tired, having slept on the old bones of the hill," she said. "You may be hungry, having eaten only the squeezings of your metal sausages. But you are not hurt badly, nor are you old, Lee-san. Why should you die?" "You cannot understand," Hartford said. He spoke more to himself than to the girl. "The medicine here is certainly primitive. You have no concept of the biological nature of disease. Tell me, Takeko-san, do you Kansans know anything of the very, very small...." "Microscopic?" Takeko asked. "Piacentelli did a splendid job of teaching you the Standard language," Hartford said. He looked up and down Takeko's trim, just post-adolescent figure in frank appraisal, jealously wondering whether Gabe could have achieved his remarkable pedagogical results by means of the pillow-book method of linguistic instruction so popular with soldiers of occupation in every time and climate. That thought, he rebuked himself, was unworthy of Pia's memory. In any case, his friend had conducted his researches wearing that guarantee of chastity, a safety-suit. "We'll have to wait an hour or so until the giraffu come," Takeko said. She unstrapped the wallet from her back and unpacked it on the grass at the edge of the little stream. The Kansan girl took out a coil of line, spun from the stalk of the sunflower, and a bronze hook. "We will feed the gentleman from the Stone House," she said. Hartford watched with amusement as she baited the hook with a bit of the bread from her knapsack, twirled the line about her head and dropped it into the center of the stream. "This place has many fish," she said. "We will not wait long before we eat." It took Takeko only ten minutes to have three seven-inch fish, so plump and meaty-looking that not even a xenologist would have wasted time studying them, lying on the grass. Hartford demanded equal time with the fishline, and discovered to his gratification that the dough he pinched off the chapattis and molded to the hook took the fancy of Kansas fish as well as Takeko's offerings. With a sense of at last participating in the affairs of the universe, he de-capitated and decaudated the six fish they ended with, and gutted them with a rich delight in the juicy messiness of the task. Hartford and Takeko scissored the fillets in split twigs and roasted them, like aquatic weenies, over a fire built from the pithy stalks of dead sunflowers. The firepit, a saucer of scooped-out dirt, had buried beneath it half a dozen of the swollen roots of sunflowers, each wrapped in the cordiform, sharkskin-surfaced leaf of the parent plant, to roast beneath the coals. They seasoned their fish with daikon, a kind of horseradish; and their plates were the fresh-baked, flat, un-leavened chappattis Takeko had brought in her pack. The tubers, eaten from a fresh leaf-plate, needed only butter. Takeko had this, too, churned of camelopard-milk cream. Buds or flower-heads of the sunflower were eaten with sunflower oil, like artichokes. "Your people have a good friend in the sunflower;" Hartford remarked, wiping his lips. "With the golden flower and the golden giraffu, with the take-grass and the good soil, we had a rich life here before you glass-headed men came," Takeko said. "Now we are treated in our own villages like rats to be driven out, in our fields as gnawing vermin. Why is your Brotherhood so angry with us, Lee-san, who live in only a few places on a wide world? Is there no law among the light-skinned people? We have lived here, on the world you call Kansas, for many generations. We were once of Earth, as were your grandfathers." "All humans were once of Earth," Hartford said. "If we are as much human as you," she said, "why does your Nef call us Hominids? Is that a name to give a brother?" "It is better than Stinker," Hartford suggested. "Hai! I tell you, Lee-san why you must re-name us. It is because men do not kill men until they give their brother-enemy a monstrous name. Why do you wish to kill us all?" she asked. "I'm not a member of the Brotherhood," Hartford said. "I'm only a man who was born on Axenite. That means, until your beast and my jeep collided, tearing my safety-suit, I was an animal uncontaminated by microscopic life. These microscopic animals, Takeko, are deadly to an Axenite." "You are not dead, though," Takeko suggested. "Ne?" "I've been breathing contaminated air for twelve hours," Hartford said. "It's true. I cannot understand why I have no fever, no malaise, no symptoms of pneumonia." Takeko giggled. "Forgive me," she said. "Kinodoku semban; but you seem to be sorry to be alive." She was silent for a moment, listening. She pointed north. "My father will appear with our giraffu soon," she said. "I can hear them." Takeko's father rode up a moment later, an unbent man of seventy. He sat astride his camelopard, a comic quadruped little better designed as a beast of burden than an ostrich, with as much dignity as though his steed were an Arabian stallion. His name, Takeko said, was Kiwa-san. The old man bowed from his saddle when his daughter introduced Hartford. At Kiwa-san's command the two giraffu he'd brought along on lead-reins spread their legs to bring their down-sloping backs a scant four feet from the ground. The saddles, with dangling, boot-like gambadoes in place of ordinary stirrups, seemed inaccessible to Hartford. "Watch me," Takeko told him. She took a short run up behind her giraffu and, with a movement like a leap-frog hurdle, flipped herself up into the saddle. Hartford stepped back, ran and leaped. He succeeded only in banging his shoes into the right sifle-joint of his mount and in flipping himself to the ground. In the interest of haste, grace was abandoned. Hartford monkey-crawled up a sturdy cane of bamboo growing nearby and, as Kiwa-san maneuvered his beast, stepped over into the saddle. "I'd better take my safety-suit and helmet," he said. "If the troopers should find it, they could follow our trail." "Hai!" Takeko said, agreeing. She leaped from her giraffu, packed the safety-suit and helmet onto the beast, and remounted. "We will now go to Yamamura," she said. Old Kiwa spoke, and she translated: "We must move quickly and with care," she said. "My father heard an hikoki—how do you say?" she asked, raising and lowering her hand. "A veeto-platform," Hartford said. "I mustn't be seen, Takeko. Colonel Nef would use my presence as an excuse to kill any of your people around me." The ride, though cautious, was indeed demanding. Hartford felt tendons stretch he didn't know he had. Muscles were bruised from his instep to his upper back, and the skin was chafed away from his inner thighs as though he'd been riding an unplaned plank. He understood, well before the journey to the mountain village was over, the importance of that lifetime exercise, best begun by riding young, known to generations of horsemen as "stretching the crutch." He swore to himself that his future transportation, if he had a future through which to transport himself, would be by boots or wheeled vehicle. The three of them were following no clear path. Kiwa led. Hartford noted that their course took them along the contours of streams, on the borders of fields, through contrasting background that would make their presence less obvious from the air. They were in a thicket of bamboo when the veeto-platform did appear. The instant they heard its whistle, Kiwa spoke a sharp word. He and his daughter slipped from their mounts, loosed the brow-bands of their camelopards and unlocked their girths, tossed off the saddles and dangling gambadoes and gave the animals each a sharp slap on the rump that sent them crashing through the bamboo. They helped Hartford unsaddle and send his beast off in another direction, and lay down in the direction the late-morning sun dialed the shadows of the bamboo stems. If the veeto-pilot saw the giraffu now, they were saddleless and innocent. The downdraft of the veeto-platform puffed dust up from the ground around them, and pressed down the leafy tops of the bamboo like a great hand stroking across the thicket. Hartford, aware of the way his bald head and pink face would stand out, dusted his hands with the soil and laced his dusty fingers over his scalp. The platform passed almost directly over them, shooting fragments of dust and bamboo-duff into every particle of clothing, into ears and eyes and nostrils, with the whirl-wind of its passage. VIII It took them half an hour to recover their giraffu and saddle up again, but Hartford did not regret the delay. Aboard the grotesque mount again, he groaned. To mask the misery of his unaccustomed pounding he paid scientific attention to the landscape, the gait of the camelopards, the leather of the saddles, and the posture and person of Takeko—this last by far the most effective of his analgesic thoughts. They rode on an ancient piedmont, among the foothills of a worn-down mountain-range. The leather of their saddles and gambadoes was, by its pattern, obviously tanned camelopard-hide. Hartford was certain that this pattern would by the end of their journey be an indelible part of his own hide. The giraffu, remarkably swift and easy-moving over the rugged, heavily grown terrain, ambled, moving both legs on the same side together. And Takeko was lovely. Hartford decided to essay his Kansan. He practiced his question: "Is Yamamura far from here?" mentally, moving his lips, until he was sure he'd mastered the phrasing. Then he addressed Old Kiwa. "Yamamura wa koko kara toi desu ka?" Kiwa smiled, and rattled off an answer much too brisk for Hartford to catch. He pointed ahead and up. "He says we must go through the pass, under the Great Buddha," Takeko explained. "We have only an hour to go." "Arigato," Hartford said, suppressing a moan. Another hour! The pass Kiwa had spoken of loomed ahead. It was quite narrow, and walled on either side by the almost perpendicular flanks of mountains, shoulder to shoulder. Kiwa went first, for the cleft could only be negotiated in single file. Takeko followed her father, and Hartford took up the rear. In the ravine it was dark. The camelopards, sensing their mangers up ahead, paced more quickly. Suddenly the canyon was light, the walls spreading further apart here. Far up on Hartford's right, seated on a shelf left from some ancient avalanche, was a gigantic figure cast of a coppery metal, green now against the granite wall. "Who is that?" Hartford called to Takeko. "It is our Daibutsu," Takeko said. "It is the Amida Buddha, the Lord of Boundless Light." "Do you worship him?" Takeko smiled and shook her head. "We worship not any man, but a Way," she said. "Butsudo—the Way of the Buddha. We are nearly to the village now, Lee-san." "I thank the Lord Buddha for that," Hartford said, bowing from his saddle toward the great bronze image. Yamamura nestled in a fold of the high mountains. The fields that supported the village, its population now doubled by the refugees from Kansannamura, were tucked here and there on narrow ledges, watered by bamboo flumes that stole water from the mountain streams. The crop of greatest importance was the ubiquitous sunflower, supplier of bread and soap ash, of cloth and bath oil, birdseed and writing paper. Bamboo grew in clefts and shelves too slight for cultivation. This was the wood for tools, the water pipe, the house wattles and, in its youth, the salad of the people, the only wood eaten in its native state. There were also carrots, beets and tiny plum-trees, and the horseradish, daikon. Yamamura was a lovely place, Hartford decided. It was twenty hours from the moment of his contamination that Hartford dismounted. He moved into the house Kiwa invited him to with as much tenderness as though he'd been carefully bastinadoed and flayed. He was, nonetheless, free of febrile symptoms. He had breathed Kansan air, had eaten its fish and drunk its water; he'd spoken with a Kansan native and had lain with his face in Kansan dust. He was still as healthy as any Axenite, never before in the saddle, would be after a five-hour ride. Kiwa's wife and Takeko's mother was a little woman named Toyomi-san, dressed in brightly patterned garments a good deal more formal than her daughter's jacket and shorts. Toyomi-san spoke no Standard, but she made quite clear to Hartford his welcome. She led him into a large, steam-filled room, where she indicated he was first to wash himself then soak, then dry and dress in the clean clothing she'd laid out for his use. The soaking water was very hot, and very welcome. Hartford sat in the copper-bottomed tub, his muscles hard and sore, until he felt the very marrow of his bones had cooked. He stepped from the tub then and dried gently, easy on his chafed back and legs. "The oil will help," Takeko said, slipping a screen shut behind her. She had bathed and brushed her black hair free of the bamboo-thicket dust, and wore now a brilliant, silk kimono of the sort her mother was wearing. Hartford held the towel at his waist. "Excuse me," he said. Takeko giggled. "Are you unique, Lee-san, that you must hide yourself? Lie down on the cot, and I will make you comfortable." Wondering greatly at the folkways of Kansas, but determined to commit no gaffe that would imperil his relations with this girl, Hartford lay face down on the mat-covered cot. Takeko removed the tenugi towel with which he'd modestly draped himself and gently stroked sweet-scented sunflower-seed oil into his macerated skin. Using the radical border of her hands, which were remarkably strong, Takeko coaxed the muscles to relax with effleurage; and she further softened the clonic hardness with a kneading motion. "This is," she said, working her thumb-knuckles up his spinal-column as though telling the beads of his vertebrae, "one of the good things my ancestors brought from earth." "Yoroshiku soro," Hartford grunted agreement. "It is good." Half an hour later, his skin soothed with oil and his muscles suppled by Takeko's massage, Hartford joined the family for supper. The Kansans used paired sticks for eating. Hartford, who'd not yet been introduced to the skill of using these o-hashi, and who was too hungry to practice now, was given a metal spoon with which to eat. When they'd finished their meal, several elder Kansans entered Kiwa-san's house. Each bowed to Hartford, who, bald-headed, his feet socked into unfamiliar geta and wearing mitten-toed stockings, bowed in return. The newcomers each spoke some Standard, but it was obvious that Takeko was the most fluent of them all. "Pia-san taught Renkei; Renkei taught me," the girl explained. "I was the second-best speaker. It would be better if Renkei were here." "I regret his death more deeply than I can tell you," Hartford said. "Renkei and Pia my friend are both dead now. This is what Renkei told me: aru-majiki koto, a thing that ought not to be." The Kansans, seated on the cushions about the room, nodded. "Do you know, Lee-san, the greatest law of life?" Takeko asked. "You said, beside the stream where we fished, that men do not kill men," Hartford answered. "But they do." "It is an ideal we have more nearly than the glass-heads," one of the Kansan elders said. "In the past four days, Renkei has died, and Pia-san. In the years before you Latecomers came to build the Stone House and cut roads and practice making holes in paper at a distance, no man died here at the hand of another." "We cannot teach the glass-heads our way when they walk about only with guns, when they live in the Stone House none of us can enter without dying, when they look at us with glass bowls over their faces and hate in their hearts," Takeko said. "The hate is hardly needful," Hartford said. "But the helmets must remain if Axenites are to live on Kansas." "Do you live?" Takeko asked quietly. "I do," Hartford said. "It puzzles me." "Does it not puzzle you that none of us harbors open sores, or coughs up phlegm, or dies of fever?" Kiwa asked, speaking through his daughter's intermediation. "I had not thought of that," Hartford admitted. "I have never before lived so close to Stinkers." Embarrassed, he stopped short. "I'm sorry," he said. "Shitsurei shimashita." "You meant us no discourtesy," Takeko said. "Think, Lee, of the word you used. Do we indeed stink?" "No," Hartford said. "It's strange. I've been told all my life of the rot and fermentation within ordinary mammals, and of the evil smells elaborated by these processes. But you, and all of Kansas, stink no more than Axenites do. You have, as we, the mulberry odor of saliva, the wheat smell of thiamin, the faint musk oil of the hair. Even your camelopards smell sweet." The girl laughed. "If you think all Kansas a place of sweet perfumes, smell this, Lee-san," she said. She took a covered dish and opened it. "This is takuwan," she said. A smell strong as that of limburger cheese made itself known in the room. "It is pickled turnip, made in the old manner of our island forefathers on Earth." "Whew!" Hartford said. "There is the true Stinker of Kansas." "Pia-san learned much from the bad-smelling takuwan," Takeko said. "His wife knew about the small stink-makers, these bacteria; she was a user of microscopes. She looked for them in the air of Kansas, and in our soil. Pia-san went even further. He took drops of our blood and other things to test." "Tell our guest, Take-chan, what Pia found," Old Kiwa told his daughter. "Hai, Otosan." The girl turned to Hartford. "In our bodies there are no mischief-makers of the sort Earth-people know. There are not even those juices Pia-san called 'footprints of the bugs.'" "He must have meant you have no bacterial antibodies," Hartford said. "That explains the whole package," he went on, with growing excitement. "Why I'm alive without my safety-suit. What Piacentelli went outside to find. And, when he found it, why he unsuited himself, knowing this world as pure as Titan. You're Axenites, you Kansans! You're as germ-free as the troopers." "The whole truth is less simple," said the lean old man who'd been introduced to Hartford as Yamata, the calligrapher. "Does the rubble of your forest-floors never turn to mould, then?" Hartford asked. "Do the bodies of your buried fathers lie uncorrupted in their graves?" "Of course not," Takeko said. "If that happened, we would be buried ourselves in unmouldered leaves. The bodies of our ancestors would be stacked about us, unchanging, like logs for the charcoal-burners. Our soil would die, and all men would die with it, if dead things did not crumble to make new soil." "Show our friend the hero of our epic," the calligrapher told her. "Hai." Takeko stood and went to another room, going through the ritual of kneeling to slide the door screen, standing, kneeling, standing, with a grace that made the kimono she wore the loveliest of garments. She brought to the small table at the center of the room a heavy object wrapped in a yellow silk tenugui. Near this on the table she placed a small lamp, fueled with sunflower-seed oil. She lighted the lamp and uncovered the instrument she'd brought in. It was the microscope Piacentelli had taken from the Barracks on his fatal expedition. Takeko dipped a chopstick into a dish and placed it beneath the objective of the microscope. "We shall look at a spot of evil-smelling takuwan-juice," she said. "There is light enough. Make it fit your eyes, Lee-san; and you will know the secret of Jodo, this world you call Kansas." IX Hartford knelt over the microscope in the yoga-posture called for by its being so near the floor and tried to adjust the instrument as he remembered having seen it done. He focused the coarse adjustment of the 'scope till he saw spots darting about the fluid Takeko had placed on the slide. He nailed the spots down with a gentle hand on the fine adjustment. The juice of the pickled turnip was aswim with tiny bodies that looked like tadpoles. "What are they?" he asked, peering into the micro-world below him. "Pia-san named them monads," said the carpenter, white-bearded Togo. "We all have them in our bodies. You have them now in yours. Our soil is alive with them. They chew the chaff of our fields into black loam; they turn to dust the flesh of our fathers. They cause turnips to become takuwan." Hartford rocked back from the microscope to sit again on his heels. "You have no disease, no benign bacterial flora and of course no bacterial antibodies. Instead you have this whip-tailed animalcule, this monad. Is this correct?" "So Pia-san said," Takeko agreed. "He said that the monad is a jealous beast. It is a tiger among the pygmies, he said. No little nuisance-makers can exist on Kansas; the monad would eat them in a rage." "The ultimate antibiotic," Hartford said. "A micro-organism that functions as a saprophyte, a soil-former and a scavenger. Besides all this, it's a universal phagocyte, policing up the human environment inside and out, to keep it clean of any other microscopic organisms. The monad fills every niche in the micro-ecology of the planet." "This is what Pia-san and his okusama, poor dead girl, discovered," Takeko said. "Renkei entered the Stone House to tell you that we do not stink, that we are not dangerous. Three people have died to tell this—and Nef still does not know." "I think he may know it after all," Hartford said. "He knows about the monad, and fears it. This little bug means that every member of the human race can join his damned Brotherhood. A crew of monads in his gut would make every man on Stinker Earth a dignotobiote, germ-free except for his housekeeping protozoa." "Until Pia-san told us," Yamata said, "we knew nothing except that we lived longer than our ancestors had. We knew that we did not suffer from the strange tirednesses the books told of, ills caused by the little animals. We did not know that the smallest natives of this planet had made of us their fortresses." "If I could only get past Nasty Nef to tell this to the Axenites," Hartford said. "Ron yori shoko," Kiwa-san said. Takeko translated for her father. "He says, Proof is stronger than argument." "Indeed," Hartford agreed. "But how do I prove to the troopers that the monad sweeps Kansas cleaner than their Barracks floors?" "As Pia-san tried to," Takeko said. "He removed his glasshead and his silken suit. He breathed our air and ate our food. He wanted to prove that he could live, but he was killed before he could. Now you have made that proof. Your brothers of the Stone House must undress of their silken suits and come among us, Lee-san." "That they will not," Hartford said. "They are certain they will die if they inhale a breath of Kansas air, chew a bite of Kansas food, drink your clear stream water. I was certain I would die when my safety-suit was torn: remember our meeting, Takeko-san? It will not be easy to persuade my brothers and sisters in the Barracks to forget their fears. We are so sure, we Axenites, that contamination will kill us that we'd rather dance with lightning and eat stones than walk this world unprotected and eat its fruits." When Takeko had respoken these words to her father, the old man said again: "Ron yori shoko." Proof is greater than argument. "Proof?" Hartford asked. "I am not proof enough to have a Regiment of Axenites shed their safety-suits and declare the Kansans their brothers. It would take years of lab work before the first of them would walk suitless onto bug-dirt. We'd have to knock down the walls of the Barracks and burn two thousand-odd safety-suits, before we'd have the Axenite troopers here trapped into being guinea-pigs." "Each trooper carries the Stone House with him when he walks our roads," the calligrapher remarked. "We have but to break through the silken suit he wears to make a trooper know the garment isn't needed here." "He'd die of fright," Hartford said. "I very nearly did. Besides, each column of troopers, a squad or the Regiment, goes out with a Decontamination Team. If a man becomes septic through some sort of accident, he's hustled by a cleanup squad into a Decontamination Vehicle for his shower, shave and shots. I know the process well," he said, running his palm over his naked head. "Ano ne," Kiwa said. "Will this Decontamination-kuruma house two thousand men? Two hundred? Twenty?" "It will hold two or three troopers at once," Hartford answered. "We have several of them, though." "So ... ka?" white-bearded Togo exclaimed. He leaned over to whisper into the ear of Takeko's father, who nodded and smiled. Old Kiwa spoke, and Takeko interpreted. "We must surprise a group of troopers," he said. "We must cause all their silken suits to be torn, or all their glass heads shattered, at one time. It is so simple as that." "Simple in all but the doing," said Yamata the calligrapher. He picked up a brush and sketched on the mat before him a line of trooper-silhouettes, a platoon, marching single-file. "How do we break into all those Stone Houses at once?" he asked. Hartford's face was pale. "We could use grenades, perhaps," he said. "Or bombs. After all, these troopers we speak of are no more than my family, my village, my people. I may of course be expected to cooperate in their destruction." Takeko reached over and took his hand, then dropped it. "Ano ne! You do not understand! We can no more injure your brothers than you can, Lee-san. We may not harm any living person. Forgive us. You misunderstand us. We are bound, Lee-sensei, by Butsudo: the Peaceful Path of the Lord Buddha." She bowed toward him, her hands clasped together, her head touching the tatami. "It is my fault if I have misunderstood," Hartford said. The men were staring, Takeko's eyes were filled with tears, the room was silent. "I do not know you well. I did not know you do not kill." "Let me tell you, then," Takeko said, rising to sit beside him. "Our people, who once lived on islands in the greater sea of Earth, were folk mighty in battle. Their pride was named the Way of the Warrior, which is called Bushido. Their loveliest flower, the sakura or cherry-blossom, they made the symbol of the warrior, so highly did they hold his calling. "After their villages had been crushed many times in war, our ancestors vowed forever to abandon Bushido, the warrior's path, and to place their feet in the path of the Lord Buddha, called Butsudo. This was many years ago, before any man had ventured into space, before our ancestors found this world you call Kansas. When they came here, they came in peace. And they named this place Jodo, which we still call it. It means the Pure Land, where men are just. And all justice is built on a single law. No man shall take man's life." "I spoke of the Axenite Brotherhood," Hartford said. "These men are a group of our leaders—Colonel Nef is one; he invited me to join him—who have decided that Stinker humanity must go. They're dedicated men, prepared to extinguish all the rest of mankind, to sterilize Earth and reseed it as a gnotobiotopic Paradise. Nef has, I fear, already killed three people to this end. "You who cannot kill will face an enemy trained in killing," he went on. "Your camelopard-mounted messengers will meet veeto-platforms with machine-guns. Your peaceful words will be drowned out by the roar of Dardick-rifles. How can you hope to live if you will not kill?" "If the choice were death or killing, Lee-san, we would gladly die," Takeko said. "We have a saying, Muriga toreba dori ga hikkomu. When might takes charge justice withdraws. We will not kill, and neither will we be defeated." Yamata the calligrapher addressed Hartford. "How badly torn must a safety-suit be, to make necessary the wearer's going into the purification cart?" he asked. "Only so much as the point of a pin would make would be enough," Hartford said. "We have to drive pins into several dozens of men's clothing at one time," Yamata said. He smiled. "So phrased, the mountain does not seem too tall to be climbed." "It would be difficult to puncture the safety-suits without hurting the wearers," Hartford said. "Few armies are so solicitous." "Butsudo forbids us to kill men," Takeko said. "It does not deny us the right, in pointing them to the path of knowledge, to jab them a bit." She smiled at Hartford. "How do you propose to do this jabbing?" he asked. "I remind you all, if you need reminding, that our troopers travel with Dardick-rifles and machine-guns, with rocket-mounted jeeps and veeto-platforms from which bombs can be dropped." Kiwa spoke. "We are like a bear after honey," he said. "We are hungry, but do not wish to taste the stings of the guardians of the hive. We must surprise them." Hartford, his knees stiff with kneeling, his backside sore from the camelopard-saddle despite the expert massage, got up to pace the floor. "We need a needle-gun of some sort," he said. "No gun," insisted white-bearded Togo. "It need have only slight power," Hartford said. "It would throw its projectile only forcefully enough to penetrate the fabric of a safety-suit." "It has been so many generations since we have been soldiers, we know nothing of weapons," Yamata-san said. He wet a fine brush with sumi, Chinese ink, and sketched rapidly. "I remember seeing pictures of Bushi carrying a sort of throwing-sticks with pointed ends in pockets on their backs, and flinging them like little spears with a kind of one-stringed lute." Hartford stared at the calligrapher's drawing, then exclaimed. "Of course! A bow and arrow." Takeko inspected the sketch. "The man who threw the stick is standing," she said. "Could we stand against troopers?" "A man would have to stand exposed to shoot an arrow," Hartford admitted. "The Dardick-guns would mow us down before we'd punctured a single safety-suit." He paced up and down the room, the only trained warrior there, trying to devise his unkilling weapon. "We have wine, Lee-san," Takeko said. "Please sit and drink." Hartford, bemused with his problem, folded his legs onto his cushion and lowered himself gently. Takeko's mother appeared with tiny cups of hot wine, sake. Hartford bowed with the others and sipped. The stuff was good, rather like a dry sherry. Takeko bowed to leave the room, returned, bowed and commenced playing a tune with the instrument she'd brought in. It was a flute made of bamboo, with a high-pitched, pure sound Hartford found quite pleasant. He frowned, though, after a moment. Takeko took the pipe from her lips. "You do not enjoy my playing?" she asked. "What is that made of?" Hartford demanded. "Just bamboo, isn't it?" "Hai, take," Takeko agreed. "It is my name. Take—bamboo. This is only a shakuha-chi, for very simple music." Hartford smiled and bowed toward Togo-san, the white-bearded carpenter. "Sir," he said, "if we may have your advice, I believe Takeko-chan has helped us find our weapon." X The meeting broke up to adjourn to Togo-san's workshop. There was bamboo there in plenty, and young men eager to help the ex-lieutenant of Axenites in testing his device. As the week wore on, young Kansans appeared from other villages, called by blabrigars and messengers on camelopard-back to join the army that was to make brothers and sisters of the troopers of First Regiment. The blowgun Hartford finally established as his field model was some two yards long, made of bamboo bored through the joints and polished smooth within, of a caliber somewhat less than the diameter of a man's little finger. Though the bamboo-tube was somewhat flexible, Togo-san and his apprentices were able to bind a front sight to the muzzle, allowing somewhat greater accuracy that could be obtained by pointing and hoping. The dart was about the length of a man's hand. Its point was a sliver of bamboo, sharp as steel, entirely sharp enough to penetrate the tough material of a safety-suit if puffed from the blowgun with enough force. All the craftsmen of the village became arms-makers. They drilled bamboo, polished the bore with abrasive-coated cord, fitted on the sights and tested their blowguns against the targets. Hundreds of darts were turned out for practice, and the most perfect were saved for the battlefield itself. The blowgunners began their drill, shooting from a prone position at targets as far as ten yards off, as great a range as amateurs could be expected to shoot with accuracy in the short time these had for practice. To fire the blowgun, the dart was wrapped in a bit of silk of sunflower-stalk-fluff, so that it would fit tightly into the tube. The puff that sent it on its way had to be sharp and hard. Achieving the proper slap of air took more practice even than aiming. Hartford became every day a better horseman, or rather camelopardist. He in fact rejoiced in opportunities to leap-frog into his saddle, fit his feet and legs into the leather gambadoes, and go hailing off into the hills to recruit men and material. He carried with him the radio he'd salvaged from his safety-suit, and could from time to time pick up First Regiment transmissions. The bitcher from his suit was useful in training large numbers of recruits on the blowgun range, and would be used when the Kansan guerrillas took the field against the troopers. He was picking up the language rapidly, now. He had to use Takeko's services as interpreter less and less. Her usefulness declined not a bit, though, as the girl became his first lieutenant in charge of details. The band of expert puff-gunners was joined by a company of scouts. These men and women skulked the hills afoot or astride camelopards, spying out the programs of the Regiment. Having no radio to maintain contact with Yamamura, each scout carried a pair of blabrigars, trained to report to a specific person in its home village when given a selected prompt-word. Yamata-san, the calligrapher, became a cartographer. He drew in jet-black sumi ink the contours of the mountains, greened in the stands of bamboo, drew blue streams and broad brown fields of sunflowers, till at last the map that filled the largest room in Yamamura was almost as real as the Kansan soil it reflected. Walking across this map in his tabi-stockinged feet, Hartford and the others of Kansas Intelligence would move toy troopers, made of wood like kokeshi-dolls, into the positions where the blabrigars reported patrols to be. The plan of battle of the Kansas forces was yawara-do, the Gentle Way also called judo. They would wait till the enemy made a move they could use, then they'd trip him up by re-directing his own strength. The move they most wanted the troopers to make was into the ravine that led toward the village of Yamamura, the pass under the Daibutsu, the huge bronze Buddha set there by their ancestors. In that ravine, under the gaze of the Lord of Boundless Light, the Kansas forces would either prevail against the invader and make him their brother by darts and sweet reason, or they would all die in the attempt. The camelopards were stabled, ready as the steeds of any march-patrolling cavalry troop. The dartsmen, and those of the women who'd shown skill in handling the blowgun, were trained and eager. The path through the pass had been memorized in infinite detail by every one of the guerrillas. The squad of sappers responsible for check-mating the troopers had prepared their levers, their blocks and skids. Nothing remained now but to coax the enemy into the battlefield of the Kansans' choosing. "Take out what's left of the safety-suit," Hartford ordered one of his men. "Leave it here—" He stabbed a toe at the map they both stood on. "Would it be well for me to leave beside the torn and broken suit signs of a fight?" asked the boy, Ito Jiro, son of Old Ito-san, the knife-maker. "If the troopers are angry, they will be careless." "If only you believed in war, Jiro-chan, you'd make a fine warrior," Hartford grinned. "Do it your way, and hurry back." Jiro placed the bait under the Regiment's nose early in the day, and returned to Yamamura. It was midday when a blabrigar flew in from one of the scouts posted to watch First Regiment's reaction. The bird prated its message into the ear of its receiver. Troopers, a band of fifty-odd, were scouring the hills to the west, following the camelopard-hoofprints left by Jiro. Aiding them in their search was the Regiment's veeto-platform, skimming, hovering, pouncing to pick up clues. "They're on the scent," Hartford said. He turned again to Ito Jiro, fleetest of the camelopard-riders. "Jiro-chan, lead them a chase that will bring them to the ravine no sooner than the Hour of the Dog. Be very cautious of the flying-thing; it can surprise you." "Hai," Jiro said, bowing. "The Hour of the Dog they will call upon you near the Daibutsu." Ito-san the knife-maker watched his son run toward the stables, the boy as excited as though he were going to a festival rather than to face alone half a company of full-armed Axenites. The blabrigars that would ride out with Jiro were trained to report to the father. It would be a long afternoon for the old man, Hartford thought. There was much to do before the scarlet bird came winging in from Jiro's shoulder with the message that the trap was sprung. At the Hour of the Monkey, four hours before the troopers were to be in ambush, the first blabrigar flew in to report to Ito-san that the boy's mount was winded, the enemy was drawing nearer the ravine, and that Jiro was approaching the point of rendezvous where he would find a fresh camelopard. Hartford ordered out two youths to join Jiro there in his harassment of the foot-soldiers from Regiment. "It is time we take up our positions," he told his band of dartsmen. "Let us go in hope." Kiwa-san, Takeko's father, stepped forward to pronounce a benediction upon the little company. "The Enlightened One, speaking at Rajagriha, spake, saying: 'Remember one thing, O beloved disciples, that hatred cannot be silenced by lies but by truth.'" The irregulars, heads bowed, replied, "Namu Amida Butsu," Glory to the Amida Buddha! Hartford, though his training as an Axenite trooper had left him as untouched by religions as by microbes, joined the prayer, feeling that a degree of celestial interest in their stratagem would not be unwelcome. The camelopardists vaulted into their saddles, adjusted their legs in the boot-like gambadoes, and slapped the reins to head their giraffu toward the ravine where the endgame would be played. Hartford rode at the head of the band, Takeko beside him. The others were dispersed at wide interval, a precaution against the veeto-platform's swooping over the horizon to surprise them en route. As they left Yamamura, the women and children of the village were leaving from the other side, together with the men too old to go out with the guerrillas. Yamamura was being abandoned until the outcome of battle made itself known. The canyon that led up the mountain's groin had once been the deep-cut bed of a stream. Collapse of over-beetling rock had formed a vault over the stream, which was consequently underground. Soil had filtered into the rocks, and bamboo had taken root. In result the lower ravine was a green enfilade hardly wider than a hallway, the walls on either side rising squarely from its floor. Well within the pass, set into the left-hand wall as one rode down from Yamamura, was a niche very like the tokonoma or honored alcove of a Kansan home. In this alcove, some fifty feet from the bottom of the pass, was set the great bronze image of Buddha, the Daibutsu of Kansas. Further down, below the Daibutsu-niche, the canyon became irregular. Along either side, some ten feet from the floor, were ledges marking the fracture planes along which ancient avalanches had calved. It was from these shelves that the Kansans hoped to ambush the men from First Regiment. The narrowness of the ravine, and the overhang of willow trees—these growing in clefts of rock, fingering their roots down to the subterranean stream—were enough, Hartford prayed, to prevent the veeto-platform's pilot from spotting the Kansans lying in wait with their blowguns. Hartford disposed his troops on the shelves, checking to see that each man had a good field of fire and adequate cover. He glanced at the sun, the Kansan timepiece. It was between six and eight in the evening, he judged, the Hour of the Clock. He pressed his ear to the radio-receiver. Short-range, the safety-suit radio picked up only occasional orders from Axenite officers and non-coms. Twice Hartford caught the name, "Lieutenant Felix." He smiled, feeling mixed emotions. Felix had been his old Platoon Sergeant, and they would face each other in an hour or so as enemies. Very likely the fifty troopers chasing Ito Juro and his fellows toward the canyon included men of the Terrible Third Platoon, his old command. Hartford checked to see his bitcher worked and waited the arrival of the message-blabrigars with fresh news. XI The first bird arrived a few moments before the radio began coming in clear. "Sakura," Hartford said, this being the prompt-word to which the blabrigar was trained to reply. "Fifty men, sir; fifty men, sir; on the way, sir; on the way, sir," the bird chanted into Hartford's ear. He let the bird rest on his shoulder; it would have to fly back to the scout who'd sent it soon, to tell him to join the rest of them at the ambush-point. The sun was low in the sky. H-hour was near. The signals began coming closer-together. "Saw one Stinker off your left flank, Miller.... Left flank-guard reporting, sir. That Gook took off due east. Blabrigar on his shoulder.... Lieutenant Felix here. Anything on the right flank?... Nothing, sir.... Keep moving, Lieutenant." This last voice was the colonel's. Hartford frowned. If Nasty Nef had come out in person, the game would have to be played fast and dirty. Hartford set his bitcher low. "Abunai yo!" he said to his guerrillas, sprawled out all along the ledge like figurines on a mantlepiece. "Be cautious. Shoot your dart and get behind something. From now on, be silent. The enemy is near." Takeko spoke: "You mean, Lee-chan, that our brothers draw near." The other Kansans smiled. Some saluted, a gesture they'd observed among the Axenites they'd been spying upon for the past few days. The first of the scouts came galloping up the gullet of the canyon. Without a sound he signaled his watching comrades, invisible above him. He made a circle with his hand, pointing up. That meant the Regiment's veeto-platform was scouting ahead of the approaching Axenites. The first man slapped his giraffu to hasten it up the pass, past the Daibutsu. Two other scouts, the foxes urging on the hounds, came shouting into the canyon. Neither of them was Ito Jiro. As his name signified, Jiro was the youngest son of Ito-san, the knife-maker. He was the darling of the family. Where was he? Hartford worried. The radio, no longer masked by the rocks, was filled with information. Hartford heard the veeto-pilot reporting: "They're headed up the gulch past the big idol, sir," he said. "There's a village up there. That's where they're probably headed. What do you want me to do, sir?" The platform hovered over the canyon, unwilling to work its way into the jagged, bamboo-and-pine-prickly fissure. "Keep in touch, Sky-Eye," Nef ordered. "We're coming right up." "Felix here, sir," the lieutenant reported. "We've got one of the Gooks prisoner. He's just a kid. Doesn't seem to know a thing." "Hold him till we get someone who talks Stinker," Nef said. They got Jiro, Hartford thought. Damn. The first of the troopers, an officer in the blue safety-suit, spearheaded the column. "Nothing in sight yet," Felix's voice reported. The officer signaled "Come on" with the sweep of his arm, and the first squad of Axenites, dispersed as skirmishers, formed themselves into a file to enter the canyon. The veeto-platform above kept the foliage pressed down with its jet of air, stirring dust that both improved concealment and threatened to trigger a sneeze from one of the ambushers. Hartford peered cautiously over the edge of the shelf. He'd set his forces far enough back in the canyon that the entire Axenite column would be encased. "Sir, this is Felix," the radio said. "Do you agree, sir, that I should place one squad in reserve till the rest get through the gully?" "Peel off one squad and stay with it, Felix," Nef said. Felix's voice again: "Sir, it was our Lieutenant Hartford that the Gooks got. I'd like to go in early." "Very well, Felix. Miller, hold your squad where it is. Disperse them well, and wait my order before bringing them into the ditch. Confirm." "Done and done, sir," Miller snapped. The first two dozen troopers were in the canyon now, half the Axenite force. Colonel Nef had shown the good sense to don an ordinary blue safety-suit; his scarlet command-suit would have made him a splendid target. Another squad entered, their Dardick-rifles held at the ready. This would have to be quick, Hartford thought, or he'd lose his entire corps at their first volley. He raised his hand, a signal visible only to Takeko. She cupped her hands around her mouth and whistled the call of the nightingale, "Ho-o-kekyo ... kekyo!" Before the echoed notes had died, the darts had found their targets. The radio was a clutter of undisciplined Damn's, cries of "I've been hit!" One trooper, quicker than the rest, caught sight of a Kansan. He raised his rifle and purred out a stream of Dardick-pellets. Yoritomo, apprentice to the paper-maker, tumbled over the lip of the ledge, his blowpipe falling with him like a jack-straw. There was a babble on the radio. Nef overrode all other circuits to command: "At ease! Rake the ledges with sustained fire." The canyon was blasted with a confetti of metal and spalled rock as the troopers hosed the shelves with bullets. The angle made aiming impossible. But by luck and the intensity of the barrage another man, the carpenter's son, had toppled to his death. "Sky-Eye! Get your butt down here!" Nef bellowed. "Decontamination Team! Bring the vehicle to the mouth of the canyon. We've got men septic." He tongued-on his bitcher and bellowed at the troopers. "On the double, through the ditch." "Yuke!" Hartford shouted to the men far up the wall, in the niche that held the Daibutsu. "Go!" The sappers at the back of the giant bronze statue bent to their levers. The tons of metal scooted slowly forward, hit the fat-smeared edge of the shelf. As quietly as a man rocking forward in prayer, the Daibutsu dropped head-down into the ravine. It struck the bottom with the sound of a great gong, and rocked, unshattered, plugging the throat of the canyon, standing as a dam. The hands of the Enlightened One were held in the positions of Protection and of Giving; His face bore still a quiet smile. About the head of the image a fountain of water burst, squeezed up from the stream below. "Namu Amida Butsu!" Takeko said, cuddled against Hartford, staring down. "Keep down," he said. He lifted his suit-radio and flicked on the transmission-switch. "This is Lee Hartford, late of the First Regiment," he announced. "The safety-suits of most of you have been breached. There is not room for more than three of you in the Decontamination Vehicle. You are not septic. I repeat: you have not been contaminated. Kansas is as safe for you as the Barracks, or Titan, or the M'Bwene planets, or in the cells at Luna. You do not need your safety-suits on Kansas." "Find that man and gun the traitor down," Nef's voice demanded from the speaker on his suit. "I am coming out unarmed," Hartford radioed. "Fire the moment you see him," Nef said. One of the officers had his Dardick-pistol drawn, his eyes traversing the canyon walls. "No, sir!" Felix's voice snapped from his bitcher. "You can't shoot the man till he's had a chance to speak." "Go to the rear at once, Private Felix," Nef bellowed. Felix pointed his handgun toward Nef. "No, sir," he replied. "Hartford was my C.O., and an honest man. I'll hear him before I see him killed. Or by my life, sir, I'll kill you after him." "This is treason," Nef said. "Drop your pistol, sir, or I'll have to try to shoot it from your hand. Excuse me, sir," Felix said. Nef's gun dropped. "You all hear me?" Felix bitched. "Hear me out there, Miller?" There was a chorus of "Roger!" Felix went on: "I'm going to unclamp my helmet, troopers. I'm going to take off my safety-suit. That's how much I trust Lee Hartford, troopers. The man who tries to stop Hartford better begin with me." Felix opened his helmet, removed it, and placed it on the rocks beside him. He went up to drink from the fountain that sparkled about the head of the Daibutsu, cupping his hands. "It's good water, men," he said. "Come on down, Hartford," he shouted through the clear night air. Lee Hartford twisted over the edge of the shelf, held himself by his finger-tips, and dropped. He stood before his old comrades in arms dressed as a country Kansan. His head bore only a stubble of hair, and a scarlet blabrigar came down to settle familiarly on his shoulder. "I caused your suits to be breached for good reason," he said, speaking into the bitcher he'd recovered from his safety-suit. "If any of you has a sore backside because of the darts my men sent at you, please accept my apologies." Two more Axenites removed their helmets, and stood grinning uncertainly at Hartford. "I have lived on Kansas for two weeks, living like a native. I've breathed Kansan air, eaten their wonderful food and even kissed one of their girls." There was a murmur of laughter. "I'm as healthy as ever I was inside the Barracks," Hartford said. "And I'm a good deal happier." There was louder laughter among the Axenites, and more helmets opened. Hartford turned to look behind him. Takeko was hanging by her finger-tips off the shelf, trying to work up the courage to drop. He went over to stand below her. "Fall to me, darling," he said. "Fall into my arms." "I hear, shujin, and obey," Takeko squeaked, and dropped. When Hartford released Takeko and turned to face the troopers, every helmet but Nef's was opened. Half a dozen of the men had already stripped to their Class B's. They had their faces tilted into the wind that was sweeping up the gullet of the canyon, smelling for the first time in their lives the scents of open nature, the spice of green life in the air. They were seeing the Kansas sky; a mosaic of stars, unfiltered by helmets. They were breathing air not humid with their own perspiration. Holding Takeko's hand in his, Hartford walked up to Felix. "You saved the day, old buddy," he said. There was the cough of a tapped-off Dardick-round. Felix fell. Colonel Nef, his pistol held at the hip, tilted it toward Hartford. He looked startled for a moment, then dropped the pistol. In his wrist were three blowgun-darts. Clustered across his chest were half a dozen more. Hartford waved at the Kansans on the ledge. "Arigato!" he shouted, and told them to come down. Two men had died in the engagement: Yoritomo the paper-maker and Sannosuke the carpenter's son. Felix's thigh-bone had been broken by Nef's shot; and Colonel Nef's right wrist would require attention. A medical officer had been sent for from the Barracks to set Felix's leg. The dead men were carried on litters up to the shelves and around the fallen Daibutsu to the village. Hartford splinted his friend's broken leg. "What now, Hartford?" Felix asked. "I suggest that you all become guests in Yamamura." "Done and done," Felix said. Takeko came up to lay a bunch of flowers on his chest. "They smell sweet," she said. "Courage such as yours smells sweet in the nostrils of heaven." "Thank you, Ma'am," Felix said. He turned his head to follow the girl as she took a second handful of flowers to place it beside the fountain that jetted about the head-standing Daibutsu. "I can see where this will be a popular planet to do duty on, Lieutenant," he said. "What you discovered here will pretty well wipe out the Brotherhood." "You're right," Hartford said. "The Brotherhood is doomed." They watched as Takeko knelt before the inverted image. "Namu Amida Butsu," she said. "All men are the same in the sight of Amida, the Lord of Boundless Light." "Maybe I'm wrong, Lieutenant," Felix said. "Maybe the Brotherhood just got started." |
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